The two boys angling

Tired of Golenishchev's cleverness, Vronsky crosses to a smaller canvas and both he and Anna exclaim at once. It is a three-year-old study of two boys angling under a willow, the elder drawing his float from behind a bush, the younger lying in the grass with his chin in his hands and his dreamy blue eyes on the water. Mikhaylov has forgotten it, as he forgets all finished pictures, and has only brought it out because an Englishman wants to buy it; he calls it nothing, an old study, and tries to turn them to a third picture. Vronsky asks the price, which in his excitement Mikhaylov finds very disagreeable. Alone afterwards, everything the visitors said loses its weight, and his certainty of the picture's perfection returns; he corrects the foreshortening of Christ's foot, cannot work further because he is too roused, and stands a long time smiling at the figure of John, which nobody remarked. In the carriage the three use the word talent often, needing a name for what they do not understand, and resolve to buy the boys.

The visitors miss the figure the painter knows is perfect and fall in love with a study he has forgotten — both responses honest, and only one of them purchasable. The narrow band between calmness and inspiration where work is possible is the most practical sentence about art in the novel. 'Talent' is exposed as a word people use to discuss what they cannot see.