Vladimir Makovsky painted ‘Master is Away’ in the 1900’s. The painter portrays an ironic scene of what a boy servant is doing while his master is away. The teenager is spread lazily in his master’s armchair. He imagines himself a rich man and is smoking a cigar rolling his eyes. The dusty cloth that the boy is still holding adds a comical note. One can see that he sat down for a minute in his work apron: his spree is about to end and he will continue his cleaning chores. Makovsky is taking an ironic view of the child’s prank while sympathizing with his social status.

The painter portrays in detail the interior of the master’s room with luxury items: a painting in a guilt frame, a sumptuous bouquet of feathers, multi-colored embroidered table-cloth, an expensive ashtray.

This luxury is beyond the reach of the boy who has to work hard from his childhood years.

Valdimir Makovsky was a master of short ‘stories’: his genre painting always portrayed a whole story rather than a specific scene. The painter continued the artistic trend of Pavel Fedotov and Vasily Pero, portraying the life of ‘people of little mark’.

The subject of Makovsky’s paintings were easily understandable by contemporaries. Fedor Dostoyevsky used to say about the painting “Nightingale Lovers” that “these little paintings even carry the love for mankind, not just for the Russian one but humankind as a whole”.

Warmth, humanism, attention to the life of various social strata was characteristic of Makovsky’s paintings. His work was highly acclaimed by Itinerant colleagues and collectors.