Ilja Repin
The master of Russian realism.
Ilya Repin painted Barge Haulers on the Volga and psychological portraits of Tolstoy and Mussorgsky. He belonged to the artists’ group known as the Peredvizhniki.
Ilya Repin was born in 1844 in the town of Chuhuiv in present-day Ukraine, which then belonged to the Russian Empire. His father was a soldier in a military colony. Ilya first learned to paint icons. In 1863 he came to St Petersburg and later entered the Imperial Academy of Arts. His national identity is debated today. He has traditionally been regarded as a Russian artist, but in Ukraine his Ukrainian origins are emphasised.
His breakthrough came with Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870–73) in the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg. It shows a group of exhausted men hauling a barge upriver with ropes. Each face is a distinct personality. The picture became a symbol of the suffering of the Russian people. After a few years in Paris, Repin joined the artists’ group the Peredvizhniki, “the Wanderers”, who organised exhibitions around the country and sought to depict Russian life realistically.
Repin painted large narrative pictures. Religious Procession in Kursk Province shows a religious procession with people from every social class. They Did Not Expect Him shows a political prisoner returning home unexpectedly. Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885), in which the tsar holds the dying son he has just struck down, was for a time banned from display. All three are in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks shows Cossacks laughing as they compose a coarse reply to the Turkish sultan.
Repin was also an outstanding portrait painter. His portrait of the composer Modest Mussorgsky was painted only days before the composer’s death in 1881. He painted the writer Leo Tolstoy many times. He became a professor at the Academy and taught many younger artists. His strength lay in his psychological acuity and in his vivid faces.
From the early 1900s Repin lived in his house, Penaty, in Kuokkala, which after the revolution ended up in Finland. He never returned to the Soviet Union and died in Kuokkala in 1930. In the Soviet Union he was nonetheless celebrated as a model for Socialist Realism.