Ilya Repin

• 1. Introduction

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  Ilya Repin painted a dying man in four sittings. The subject was Modest Mussorgsky, one of Russia's greatest composers, ravaged by alcoholism and depression. Repin began the work just four days before Mussorgsky died, and when the composer was gone, Repin sold the portrait and used the proceeds to erect a monument in his memory. That act says something essential about Repin: he did not merely observe Russian life, he felt implicated in it.

  Born in 1844 in the provincial town of Chuguev in what is now Ukraine, Repin became one of the most celebrated painters Russia ever produced. His major works span brutal labor on the Volga, a tsar murdering his own son, and Cossacks laughing their way through an obscene letter to a Turkish sultan. He painted more than three hundred portraits, befriended Leo Tolstoy for thirty years, and spent the final decades of his life in a country house in Finland, stranded by revolution and border closures, working until the end.

  How did a boy from a military settler's family, who began painting icons at sixteen, arrive at the center of nineteenth-century Russian art? And what did it cost him to stay there?

• 2. Chuguev to Saint Petersburg

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  Chuguev sat 45 miles from Kharkov, and for a boy with talent, that distance from the capital measured in ambition rather than miles. Repin's father, Yefim Vasilyevich Repin, had spent 27 years in the Imperial Russian Army, fighting in three separate wars before retiring to sell horses as an itinerant merchant. His mother, Tatyana Stepanovna, was the daughter of a soldier and taught at the local school where Repin enrolled at the age of eleven.

  At thirteen, his father placed him in the workshop of Ivan Bunakov, an icon painter. By sixteen, his skill had grown enough for him to join an artel, a cooperative of artists called the Society for the Encouragement of Artists, which traveled through Voronezh province painting icons and wall paintings. These were not glamorous commissions, but they trained his hand.

  In October 1863, Repin competed for admission to the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg and failed. He did not go home. He rented a small room in the city, audited courses in academic drawing, and tried again in January 1864. This time he was admitted without fee. At the academy he found Ivan Kramskoi, who became both professor and mentor, and who would later write that Repin was capable of depicting the Russian peasant exactly as he was, in a way no other artist had managed.

• 3. The Volga and a Career Launched

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  In 1870, Repin traveled to the Volga River with two other artists to sketch landscapes and study barge haulers, the laborers who physically dragged boats upstream against the current. The drawings he brought back to Saint Petersburg were striking enough to win him a commission from Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich for a large-scale painting on the subject.

  Barge Haulers on the Volga was completed in 1873. When it was shown at the Vienna International Exposition, it brought Repin his first international attention and earned him a grant from the Academy of Fine Arts. In a letter to his friend and mentor Vladimir Stasov in 1872, Repin had written: "Now it is the peasant who is the judge and so it is necessary to represent his interests. That is just the thing for me, since I am myself, as you know, a peasant, the son of a retired soldier who served twenty-seven hard years in Nicholas I's army."

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky was among those who praised the painting. Stasov called it a watershed. Repin had done something the Russian Academy had not produced: a work of critical realism that drew its force from Russian life as it was actually lived, not as academic formalism imagined it. That painting made him the leader of a new movement, and he was twenty-eight years old.

• 4. Paris, Impressionism, and Doubt

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  The grant from the Academy funded an extended tour through Austria and Italy before Repin arrived in Paris in 1873. He rented an apartment in Montmartre at 13 rue Veron, and a small attic studio under a mansard roof at number 31 on the same street. He stayed for two years.

  He was in Paris in April 1874 when the First Impressionist Exhibition was held, and what he saw provoked him. By 1875 he was writing to Stasov about "the liberty of the impressionists, Manet, Monet et the others, and their infantile truthfulness." He admired their handling of light and color. In 1876, he painted a portrait of his wife Vera in the exact style of Berthe Morisot's portrait by Edouard Manet, explicitly as a tribute. But he could not follow them all the way.

  For Repin, art without moral or social purpose was incomplete. He spent two months painting landscapes outdoors at Veules-les-Roses in Normandy, absorbing impressionist technique, and then used it in service of his own concerns. His major Russian work from the Paris period was Sadko (1876), a mystical allegory of an undersea kingdom with elements of Art Nouveau. When he wrote to Stasov about returning home, his tone was unambiguous: "I dream only of returning to Russia and working seriously. But Paris was of great utility to me, it can't be denied."

• 5. Scandal and the Wanderers

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  Back in Russia by 1876, Repin joined the Wanderers, a realist movement founded in Saint Petersburg in 1863 that aimed to break with classical models and create a specifically Russian art. The movement drew painters, sculptors, writers, and composers into a single community of purpose.

  His Religious Procession in Kursk Province, presented at the twelfth annual Wanderers exposition, was one of the defining works of that tradition. It portrayed an extraordinary crowd of realistic figures: surly policemen, weary monks, children, and beggars, each with a distinct personality.

  Then came Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, completed in 1885. It depicted the tsar, his face full of horror, just after he had killed his son with his sceptre in a demented rage. The painting caused a scandal. Some critics read it as a veiled attack on Tsar Alexander III, who had brutally suppressed opposition after a failed assassination attempt. The more aesthetic wing of the Wanderers condemned it as sensationalist. The painting was vandalized twice and removed from view at the tsar's request. The tsar eventually reconsidered, and it went back on display. The controversy did not slow Repin; it seemed to sharpen him. The painting They Did Not Expect Him (1884-1888), depicting a former revolutionary, emaciated from prison and exile, returning without warning to his family, showed he had no intention of softening his subject matter.

• 6. Tolstoy and the Portraits

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  In 1880, Leo Tolstoy arrived at Repin's small studio on Bolshoi Trubny street in Moscow to introduce himself. Tolstoy was 52 and already famous. Repin was 36. The friendship that began that day lasted thirty years, until Tolstoy's death in 1910.

  Repin visited Tolstoy regularly at his Moscow residence and at his country estate at Yasnaya Polyana. He painted Tolstoy in peasant dress, working in fields, reading under a tree. Tolstoy had to be persuaded to allow himself to be depicted working barefoot in a field, as he ordinarily did. He accepted. Tolstoy wrote of Repin after an 1887 visit: "Repin came to see me and painted a fine portrait. I appreciate him more and more; he is a lively person, approaching the light to which all of us aspire, including us poor sinners."

  Repin's last visit to Yasnaya Polyana came in 1907, when Tolstoy was 79. Despite his age, Tolstoy rode horseback with Repin, ploughed fields, cleared brush, and hiked through the countryside for nine hours, the two men discussing philosophy and morals the entire time.

  Portraiture was Repin's most sustained achievement across his career. He preceded each portrait with six or seven sketches. He produced more than three hundred portraits in total, painting nearly every major political figure, writer, and composer of his era. One deliberate exception was Dostoevsky, whose mysticism Repin could not appreciate. His portrait of Mussorgsky, begun four days before the composer's death, became one of the most famous images in Russian art, a face of ruin and genius caught in a final, fleeting sitting.

• 7. The Cossacks and The Penates

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  Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks occupied Repin periodically from 1880 to 1891. The painting depicts an apocryphal event in 1678, when a group of Cossacks supposedly amused themselves by drafting a highly insulting letter to the Turkish sultan, addressing him as "The Grand Imbecile." Repin traveled along the Volga and the Don to Cossack regions in 1887, gathering material. Most of the models were faculty from the Academy of Arts, representing a variety of nationalities including Russians, Ukrainians, a Cossack student, Greeks, and Poles.

  Hidden near the top right of the painting, almost obscured behind the figure of Taras Bulba, is Fyodor Stravinsky, an opera singer with the Mariinsky Theatre of Polish descent and the father of the composer Igor Stravinsky. The central figure was modeled on Russian General Mikhail Dragomirov, inspired by the legendary Cossack leader Ivan Sirko. The finished work was so popular that Repin painted a second version.

  In 1890, Repin met Natalia Nordman, the daughter of an admiral and a writer and feminist. In 1899 they built the Penaty Memorial Estate near the village of Kuokkala, about forty kilometres north of Saint Petersburg, in the Viipuri Province of the Grand Duchy of Finland. The estate was eccentric by design: a studio under a pyramidal lantern roof, a landscape garden with a Pushkin alley of trees, a multicoloured music kiosk in the Egyptian style, and a telescope overlooking the Gulf of Finland. Every Wednesday, Repin hosted elaborate receptions attended by guests including the opera singer Chaliapin, the writer Maxim Gorky, the composer Alexander Glazunov, and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

• 8. Revolution and Refusal

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  Natalia Nordman became ill with tuberculosis and left for treatment in Locarno, Switzerland. She refused help from her family and died there in 1914, the same year the First World War began. Then came 1917.

  Repin welcomed the February Revolution. He joined the Constitutional Democratic Party, was offered the rank of Councillor of State, and was invited to take a seat in the Duma. He painted a portrait of Alexander Kerensky, the Russian president before the Bolshevik seizure of power. But the October Revolution appalled him. He called the violence and terror unleashed by the Bolsheviks intolerable, and when Finland declared its independence from Russia later that year, the border closed and Repin refused to cross back into Russia.

  In 1925, Joseph Stalin sent a delegation of Soviet artists, including Repin's former student Isaak Brodsky, to persuade the painter to return to Saint Petersburg, which had been renamed Leningrad. Repin refused. He had not been able to attend his own jubilee exhibition there that year. He donated three sketches of the 1905 Revolution and a portrait of Kerensky to the Museum of the Revolution of 1905, but he would not go back.

  His final work was The Hopak Dance, a painting of Zaporozhian Cossacks dancing, begun in 1926 and worked on through 1928-1929. He painted it on linoleum because he could not find a canvas large enough. In one of his last letters he wrote: "kind, dear compatriots … I ask you to believe in the sense of my devotion and endless regret that I can't move to live in a sweet, joyful Ukraine … Loving you from the childhood, Ilya Repin." He died in 1930 at the age of 86 and was buried at the Penates. After the Winter War in 1939, the Soviet Union annexed the territory of Kuokkala, and in 1948 it was renamed Repino in his honor.