I like the comparison with Repin a lot, and as you see you are quite right about you assessment of its relationship to social realism and illustration. As a matter of fact, to me it doesn’t bring to mind comics as much as certain mid- to late 19th-century, as well as early 20th-century Scandinavian illustrators, working with Nordic-inflected subject matter, first and foremost Lorenz Frølich (1820-1908) and his followers.

Does anyone else have any thoughts?

It looks like an allegory of painting of some kind, an allegory of the fate of realist painting: figures out of Ilya Repin allowed into the hallowed halls of some museum for an audience or feast with royalty, a fictional encounter but likely as close as these people will ever get. Fictional and sadly inedible. Peasants are invited to a sumptuous table at which they can never eat because it is only the representation of food.

At the same time the painted royalty — much more intentionally presented as painted than the Repin peasantry –very clearly consider their audience as well, done in the style of Repin (?) an artist at the birth of modernism who produced a greatness with more in common with the past than the future of fine art. Repin’s legacy trailed off in Social Realism in Russia and, it could be said, in the tradition of illustration exemplified in America by N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle.

The subject matter of the painting the peasants look at has enough in common with typical paintings by Wyeth and Pyle to suggest a parallel. And the division between it and the peasants is strong enough to make one think in terms of shifts in historical periods. And that is all I could suggest in terms of cartooning prototypes: the historical moment when realist painting styles began to be valued only by illustrators.

But I’ll leave this at the point where further elaboration, if based on a wrong interpretation, would only lead me to absurdities. As I said, I look forward to more information. It is a very cool image.