#faces

The story goes that a Turkish sultan sent these men a demand to surrender and they wrote back something so filthy it stayed famous for centuries — nobody seems sure the letter ever really existed. Repin kept at this for something like a decade, from what I can find, using friends and neighbours as models; the one bent over the paper was apparently a historian he knew who fed him the details.

From what I can find this went up around his hundredth birthday, which is some age to be handed a wall that long. It's outside on the Place des Nations rather than in, so you don't need a pass to get a look at it.

Apparently this reworks the same crowd and shoreline from a painting he'd made the year before, and he returned to these same faces again in prints a couple years later. It was one piece in a much bigger series he kept adding to for decades, loosely tracking stages of a life.

Painted while he was teaching at the Bauhaus, a school better known for chairs and lettering than for cats. The bird up on the forehead isn't a bird in the room, from what I've read — it's meant to be what the cat has in mind.