Raising of Jairus' Daughter

Raising of Jairus' Daughter, painted in 1871 and now in the collection of the Scientific-Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, is an early Polenov work depicting one of Christ's miracles as recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels. The narrative is one of the most dramatically human of the miracle stories: a synagogue ruler named Jairus begs Jesus to heal his dying twelve-year-old daughter; by the time Jesus arrives, the child has died, and the household is in mourning; Jesus dismisses the mourners with the statement that the girl is only sleeping, then takes her hand and raises her. The subject appealed to a wide range of European painters for its combination of intimate domestic setting, parental grief, and miraculous resolution. The 1871 date places this among Polenov's earliest exhibited works, when he was still a student at the Academy, and it reveals his early engagement with biblical narrative that would define his mature career.

Oil on canvas, the work reflects Polenov's academic training in its compositional approach to the multi-figure narrative scene. The domestic interior setting presents a different set of pictorial problems from his later outdoor subjects — a more controlled, studio-lit space in which the miracle is enacted within an intimate private chamber rather than a public arena.