Пир блудного сына

Пир блудного сына (The Feast of the Prodigal Son), painted in 1874 and now at Abramtsevo, is an early Polenov work exploring the New Testament parable of the prodigal son — the young man who squanders his inheritance in dissolute living before returning repentant to his father's house. The 1874 date places this work in Polenov's formative years, when he was studying at the Imperial Academy of Arts and beginning to develop his characteristic approach to biblical subject matter. Abramtsevo, where the work is preserved, was the estate of the industrialist and art patron Savva Mamontov, which became the most important centre of the Russian art world in the 1870s and 1880s, hosting virtually every significant Russian painter of the period. Polenov was a central member of the Abramtsevo circle, and works associated with the estate carry that community's particular atmosphere of intellectual and artistic exchange.

On canvas, the early work shows Polenov still working within academic compositional conventions for multi-figure biblical scenes, with the influence of his Academy training visible in the organised pictorial space and relatively smooth, controlled paint handling. The palette is characteristically warm for this period of his work, with Mediterranean ochres and earth tones dominating.