A Sorcerer Comes to a Peasant Wedding

A Sorcerer Comes to a Peasant Wedding is a painting by the Russian artist Vassily Maximov (1844–1911), completed in 1875. It belongs to the State Tretyakov Gallery. The size of the canvas is 116×188 cm.

The painting depicts an episode of a peasant wedding feast, the joyful course of which is disturbed by the sudden appearance of a snow-covered village sorcerer. Maximov worked on this painting in 1871–1875 and it was presented at 4th Travelling Exhibitions, which opened in St. Petersburg in February 1875.

Maximov's work made a good impression — in particular, the critic Adrian Prakhov wrote that the painting was "conceived and painted as if his popular imagination had created it". Immediately after the exhibition, the canvas was bought from the artist by Pavel Tretyakov. In 1878 the painting A Sorcerer Comes to a Peasant Wedding was included in the Russian exposition at the World Exhibition in Paris.

Critic Vladimir Stasov wrote that this painting was a profound and talented picture of "village faith and that domestic spirit which generations of centuries live at home, in remote villages"; in his opinion, it is "the best, most important and most significant" of what Maximov created. Ethnographer Sergey Tokarev noted that in this work the artist "managed to convey extremely expressively and aptly those mixed feelings of superstitious fear, anxiety in the face of some out-of-place power, but at the same time and reverence, which causes all the personality of the old sorcerer who suddenly appeared in the midst of the wedding festivities..." The art historian Dmitry Sarabianov considered the painting A Sorcerer Comes to a Peasant Wedding to be Maximov's best work and wrote that this canvas brought its author universal fame and placed him "in the first ranks of Russian artists-realists".