Ilya Repin was one of the greatest Realist painters of the Russian Empire. Born in present-day Ukraine, he traveled extensively, observing people and personalities. Although he was mostly known as a history painter, many of his works bore political messages about inequality, class difference, and the fates of different people in monarchist Russia. Read on to become familiarized with six important works by Ilya Repin.
1. Ivan The Terrible and His Son Ivan
Perhaps the most recognizable image created by Ilya Repin is this macabre painting of the mad tyrant Ivan the Terrible murdering his own son. Although some historians doubt that this event happened in reality, Repin chose to paint it as a response to a string of political assassinations and executions that shook Russia in the 1880s. During his visit to Spain, Repin witnessed bullfights. These violent scenes with blood soaking the arenas impressed him so much that he immediately started his work on the painting. His Ivan hardly inspired fear anymore; rather, he seemed miserable, repulsive, and pathetic. Clutching his son’s lifeless body, he wails hysterically, realizing the irreversible damage he has caused to his family and himself. Pools of blood on the floor seem to grow bigger and bigger as if threatening to fill the entire room up to the roof.
Since its first public display, the painting earned a difficult reputation. Some visitors fainted in front of it, while others sent angry letters to the officials, calling for an immediate punishment for Repin, who dared to paint the notorious monarch in such an unfavorable light. At least twice in history, the painting was attacked by mentally unstable vandals. After the last attack in 2018, the painting required a five-year-long restoration process of both the canvas and the original frame which was chosen by Repin.
2. Barge Haulers on the Volga
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterBurlak was a seasonal spring-to-fall occupation that largely went extinct after steamships became the dominant form of water transport. A group of four to two hundred burlaks (depending on the ship’s size), strong and tough men, had to physically pull the boat against the river’s current. The job paid relatively well but was obviously challenging, with many burlaks dying from exhaustion. Repin witnessed them for the first time during the late 1860s student trip and was shocked by the idea of using people as cattle. Even more shocking was the contrast between the dirty and exhausted haulers and the prosperous Russians in elegant dresses and clean uniforms, promenading on the same river banks and enjoying boat tours.
Painting burlacks was a challenge for Repin, who hadn’t yet graduated from the art academy. The subject matter went against all painting canons he was taught to follow, yet he was too fixed on it. Sketches from memory did not provide the desired result, so the artist decided to travel to the banks of the Volga River to meet the men in person. Every man in the painting had a name, a personality, and a life story. European critics who had the chance to see the painting in Vienna and Paris compared Repin’s raw and compassionate imagery to the style of Gustave Courbet, the great French Realist.
3. Sadko
In 1871, Ilya Repin, an outstanding young painter, won the art academy grant that covered several years of living and working in Europe. Repin traveled through Italy admiring the works of Titian and Veronese (but found Raphael boring and outdated). He soon settled in Paris, renting a studio in the city center. There, Repin studied the newest art movements and styles. He liked the technical qualities of Impressionist painting yet found them too simple in meaning for his own use.
The most famous work from Repin’s Parisian period illustrated a Russian medieval epic about Sadko, a traveling musician and merchant famous for his wit. According to the tale, Sadko was invited to play for the underwater Sea Tsar. Impressed by his music, the Tsar offered Sadko to choose a wife among his sea maidens, the rarest of beauties, but Sadko still decided to return to the one that was waiting for him on the land. Repin’s painting bore the obvious influence of the French Symbolist painting, namely the works of Gustave Moreau.
The sea maidens represented different cultures and nationalities (some of them – Italian femme fatales copied from Titian), with the dark-haired Russian wife of Sadko seen in the background. To properly paint the diverse underwater fauna, Repin traveled to Berlin Aquarium and studied marine atlases. The painting became a success in Russia and even earned the artist a permanent membership in the Imperial Academy of Arts. And yet, Repin believed it was one of his worst works ever and he even wanted to destroy it.
4. They Did Not Expect Him
One of the key parts of Repin’s so-called Revolutionary Cycle, the painting illustrated the sudden return of a political prisoner home from exile. In the 1880s, many young activists, mostly of left-wing affiliations, were arrested, deported to the outskirts of the empire, or even executed. Repin was sympathetic to their cause but showed no support for political terrorism which some of these people practiced. In his Revolutionary Cycle, the artist painted the revolutionaries as tragic young intellectuals, ready to make a sacrifice for the greater good. The recently released young man for the first time in years, met his family, who were both shocked and relieved. Many critics noticed the religious undertone of the composition, rhyming it with the stories of the prodigal son’s return and the apparition of the resurrected Christ.
Despite the fact that the political message appears to be the work’s main goal, Repin’s initial idea for the painting was different. The first version of the composition depicted not the young man returning from exile but a young woman, a student coming home from studies abroad. Despite the tonal differences, both concepts reflected Repin’s interest in the new progressive generation of Russians who struggled to find a place for themselves in the old world.
5. The Grand Duchess Sophia
The Grand Duchess Sophia was the first history painting created by Repin. It reflected a remarkable yet often overlooked episode from Russian history when Sophia Alekseyevna, the elder sister of Peter the Great, became the regent ruler of Russia until her brother became old enough to govern. Sophia was not too keen on giving up her power and arranged an unsuccessful mutiny, after which her brother imprisoned her in the Novodevichy convent in Moscow.
A few years later, another mutiny ignited, with Sophia immediately becoming the prime suspect of its organization. The rebellious troops were brutally executed along with Sophia’s servants. Some of them were hanged right behind her window to force the former regent to talk. Repin’s painting showed a silhouette of a hanged man behind the glass, with Sophia equally angry, scared, shocked, and utterly powerless. Although her involvement in the mutiny was never proven, she never left the convent’s walls and died there in 1704, six years after the events reimagined by Repin.
To capture the character of a woman ready to fight for her power and challenge the existing order, Repin spent months talking and painting portraits of the most progressive women of his time – composers, writers, and political activists. Unlike many of his colleagues, he supported women’s suffrage and encouraged the careers of women artists.
6. Religious Procession in Kursk Province: Ilya Repin Reinventing the Genre
One of Ilya Repin’s accomplishments was the reinvention of the genre scene. Genre painting was a specific type of art that focused on ordinary life, with no distinct identity attached to any of its characters. For decades, genre painting was seen as art of lesser value that was incomparable in emotional depth and significance with history painting and portraiture. Repin, however, inverted the tradition, adding deep psychologism and intensity to his scenes.
The procession accompanied the annual transfer of the Our Lady of Kursk icon from the monastery it belonged to to a cathedral in the city of Kursk. One-way travel spanned more than thirty kilometers, with pilgrims of all ages and classes following it. Such processions were typical for the Orthodox Christian culture, and Repin witnessed it not only in Kursk but in his native Kharkiv region in Ukraine. The most significant component of the painting was not the spiritual meaning of the procession and not the religious fervor of its participants, but rather the inherent class structure and inequality built into the seemingly uniting ritual. Repin painted more than seventy figures for the scene, ranging from homeless beggars and peasants to wealthy merchants and municipality officials.
According to the rules of such processions, one’s social status corresponded to the place they were allowed to occupy in the crowd. The higher the rank, the closer they were allowed to approach the moving icon. Repin illustrated this rigorous order in the central right part of the composition where an officer in a white uniform is shown pushing away a crippled man who dared to break the rule.
