The Peredvizhniki and Realism
Fourteen students walked out of the Academy, and the travelling exhibitions took art out into the country. Repin, Kramskoi, Surikov and Savrasov painted the Russian people, their history and their landscape with a new passion for truth.
In 1863 fourteen of the Academy’s best students refused to compete for the gold medal with a prescribed subject from Norse mythology, Feast in Valhalla. They wanted to choose for themselves what they would paint. Led by Ivan Kramskoi, they formed an artel, a cooperative, and in 1870 the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions was founded.
The Peredvizhniki, “the Wanderers”, exhibited in St Petersburg and Moscow and then sent the exhibition on to cities such as Kyiv, Kazan and Kharkiv. They wanted to paint the real Russia: the poverty of the peasants, priests and officials, the dramas of history and the vast Russian landscape. The critic Vladimir Stasov became their spokesman.
Ilya Repin became the movement’s leading painter with Barge Haulers on the Volga, and Vasily Surikov painted Russian history as a popular drama. Ivan Shishkin, Alexei Savrasov and Isaac Levitan made landscape painting a national art, and the collector Pavel Tretyakov bought their pictures for his gallery in Moscow.