The exhibition of the Engels Museum of Local Lore presents a photograph depicting the trip of Yakov Yakovlevich Weber together with his son Leonhard to the city of Engels in July 1957. The artist returned to his native land after many years of absence in the hope to retrieve some of his paintings, lost earlier during his arrest and exile, and to fulfill his long-standing dream of opening a solo exhibition in his native Volga land.

The photo, besides Yakov and Leonhard Weber, shows the artist’s students and admirers, including Alexey Dokunin, as well as Pavel Zorya, illustrator, journalist, caricaturist, and Grigory Uryadov, an easel painter. In 1937, Grigory Uryadov also became a victim of mass repressions and spent many years in Kolyma. From the mid-1940s the artist lived in Engels, painting portraits, still lifes, and everyday scenes with his characteristic unpretentiousness and open-mindedness. The arrival of Yakov Weber was preceded by an active correspondence with his other student, Nikolay Kukhovarenko. Weber asked Kukhovarenko to assist him in finding the paintings that Weber’s wife had given to friends and acquaintances for safekeeping before the deportation of the entire family to Kazakhstan in the fall of 1941.

The long-awaited meeting of students with the teacher took place in the city of Saratov. It can be assumed that the future exhibition of the artist was discussed. However, the dream of the 87-year-old artist was never destined to come true. It is known from his correspondence with Nikolay Kukhovarenko that the authorities of the Saratov region refused to allow Weber a solo exhibition. The Saratov Regional Committee of the Communist Party and the panel of jurors also refused to send the works of Yakov Weber to Moscow for an all-republic exhibition, despite the fact that in December 1956 Weber was rehabilitated as illegally convicted, he was reinstated as an honored artist and an honorary personal pensioner — a citizen of the Soviet Union.

Yakov Weber wrote in the last years of his life, “And I’m saying goodbye to the cherished thought of a solo exhibition and I don’t want a posthumous one simply because my best works — where can I find them? And do they still exist?“.