What's going on in Vasily Perov's painting? (PICS) 

Talented artist Vasily Perov became famous in 1857, after he presented his painting ‘The Police Officer's Arrival at the Investigation’. Critics called him the heir to the already famous Pavel Fedotov, whose genre paintings accurately and ironically conveyed the lives of different social classes.

In 1864, Perov returned from a two-year boarding trip to Europe. The first work he created after settling in Moscow was the painting ‘The Janitor Renting an Apartment to a Lady’.

The Truth of Life

A barefoot man in a shirt, clearly drunk, is yelling at two women – apparently a mother and daughter. He is standing on a porch, grimacing and scratching himself, while the lady has to tilt her head back to continue the unpleasant conversation. Her daughter, meanwhile, has turned away in confusion – the way she clutches her handkerchief in her hands reveals how painful this situation is for her.

To understand the origins of this subject, one must consider the time the painting was created – 1864-1865. Only a few years had passed since the abolition of serfdom in Russia. And because of this, many landowners were ruined, unable to run their businesses as before. They were left to sell their lands and, when their money ran out, find ways to earn a living. They also had to change their homes, moving into simpler apartments. Perhaps, this is exactly what has happened to the heroines of Perov's painting.

Know your place

Apparently, the lady and her daughter came looking for a place to live in a tenement house somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the ground floors were given over to various stores, while the second and third floors were occupied by wealthy tenants. The higher the floor, the lower the income of the tenants. It seems the impoverished women had nothing to look forward to except a small room under the roof. That's why the janitor is pointing upward.

Keys to the rooms had to be obtained from him, too. This man didn't simply keep the courtyard clean. Rather, he acted as a castellan or elder of the tenement house. He maintained public order, showed apartments to potential tenants, collected rent and took the residents' passports to the police station for registration.

In short, the janitor was an important person – it's no coincidence that his gatehouse proudly bears the inscription "Ko dvorniku" (meaning, "to the janitor"). And his own behavior might not have been the best. "Grigory sometimes likes to shout, sometimes he likes to be rude; but, he also readily humbles himself, content to turn away and grumble and even scold behind his back," wrote writer and Russian dictionary compiler Vladimir Dal in his essay about the janitor.

In 1878, Perov painted a second version of the painting, depicting the heroines as even more impoverished and the janitor as repulsive.