flatter the artist to say that the figures in his canvases and portraits belong to their time; the same could be said regarding the work of any of his contemporaries, even the mediocre ones. The figures in Repin’s paintings and drawings are the historical reality, with all its hopes and suffering, its spiritual energy and its painful contradictions.
“As in life” is an expression often used to describe the distinctive quality of Repin’s work. This expression does indeed reflect the essential principles of tone and style in his creative legacy, and yet, when allocated the role of general characteristic, it oversimplifies the nature of Repin’s realism. This view fails to grasp the main thing – the artist’s strong creative will, the directness of his conception, his tremendous technical mastery, in short, everything which causes real life to assume on his canvases the form of great art. In order to understand the great transformative power of Repin’s artistic language one has to penetrate the creative world from which such works as the Portrait of Modest Mussorgsky, Unexpected Return, Religious Procession in Kursk Province, and the Portrait of Polina Strepetova emerged.
Nadia Repina Painting Ceramics, 1891.
Charcoal on paper, 43.8 × 34.2 cm.
State Art Museum Abramtsevo, Abramtsevo, Russia.
Portrait of the Philosopher and Poet Vladimir Soloviev, 1891.
Pencil on paper, 34.3 × 23.6 cm.
Brodsky House Museum, St Petersburg.
The search for truth and the search for an ideal led Repin along various paths, and was tempered by various aspects of the artist’s own social and spiritual experiences and certain elements in the national cultural tradition. As was the case with most representatives of the Russian realist school of the second half of the nineteenth century, Repin most often selected dramatic conflicts rooted in reality for his works, drawn either from contemporary life or from the historical past. Much less often he used mythological images in his work, but when they do occur they are used with the same strong sense of purpose. Some of his pictures, based on Biblical subjects or Christian mythology, are justifiably counted among his greatest works. When dealing with the subjects of Repin’s works, it is important to grasp the logic of their co-existence and interconnection, their relationship with a general set of conceptions regarding the meaning of human life. One should constantly remember that Repin’s work is like an intricate multidimensional structure, rooted both in the creative individuality of the artist himself and in the complex artistic consciousness of his time.
Ilya Yefimovich Repin was born in 1844, in the small Ukrainian town of Chuguyev, the son of a private in the Uhlan Regiment stationed there. Later, at various times in the course of his long life, he would recollect with distaste the military settlements where he spent his early years, specifically their regimentation and iron discipline. These childhood memories undoubtedly played quite an important role in the formation of the artist’s deep democratic convictions. In 1872, Repin wrote to his friend, the critic Vladimir Stasov, regarding the mission of the artistic intelligentsia in the social life of the country: “Now it is the peasant who is 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.)”[1]
Portrait of Actress Eleonora Duse, 1891.
Charcoal on canvas, 103 × 139 cm.
The Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow.
Early one grey November morning, a young Cossack from the Government of Kharkov knocked at the portals of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in the city by the Neva. He was pale and shy of manner, with thick masses of brown hair clustering about brow and ears, and under his arm carried a portfolio of sketches. The lad had journeyed all the way from Chuguev, an isolated village amid the steppes of Little Russia, his entire capital consisting of forty rubles, and a consuming desire to become a painter. Born on July 24th in 1844, the son of a military father and a gentle, solicitous mother, Ilya Yefimovich Repin early displayed marked capacity for graphic and plastic expression. Whilst a mere child he used to draw pictures for his sister and her playmates, as well as cut figures out of cardboard and model animals in wax. Though delicate, he was sent to the communal school, where his mother was a teacher, and later attended the nearby Military Topographical Institute, but on the closing of the latter, he was apprenticed at the age of thirteen to Anton Bunakov, a local painter of sacred images. So rapid was the boy’s progress, that within three years he was able to support himself, receiving anywhere from two to five, and even as high as twenty rubles for a religious composition or the likeness of some worthy villager. Pious muzhiks and pompous rural dignitaries would come from a hundred versts or more to see his ikoni or secure his services as ecclesiastical decorator, the most famous of his efforts being a fervid and dramatic St Simeon. It was while working in the church of Sirotin that Repin first heard of the eager, ambitious life of the capital, with its opportunities so far beyond the limitations of provincial endeavour. Certain of his colleagues told him not only of the Academy, but of Kramskoy, the leader of the new movement, who had lately paid a visit to Ostrogorsk, bringing with him the atmosphere of the city and the ferment of fresh social and artistic ideas.
Raising of Jairus’ Daughter, 1871.
Oil on canvas, 229 × 382 cm.
The Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
His arrival in the capital coincided with one of the most significant events in Russian cultural life in the 1860s – a major demonstration by young artists who challenged their academic teachers and insisted that art had the right and duty to follow truth in life. This was the famous 1863 “Rebellion of the Fourteen” at the Academy of Arts, when fourteen final-year students took a stand against attempts to reduce the social aspects of creative work, and to regiment its development through outdated academic dictates. They only had one demand, but a highly significant one: to be allowed to choose the subject of their graduation work. When this demand was rejected by the administration of the Academy, the students resigned from the Academy en masse. And so the year 1863 became an important milestone in the history of Russian art, marking a new stage in the social selfawareness of artists and their understanding of their professional aims.
The works Repin produced during his years at the Academy of Arts suggest a certain dichotomy in his creative efforts. As a student, he followed the obligatory academic programme, with subjects far removed from ordinary hopes and fears, from “empirical” reality. However, as a young artist highly receptive to impressions of life, he had no intention of cutting himself off from that reality. He tried his hand, not without success, at unaffected “domestic” genre scenes (Preparation for the Examination), made lyrical portraits of people close to him (Portrait of Vera Shevtsova, 1869), and in his final years as a student worked long and hard on Barge Haulers on the Volga, a picture of social import which brought the young Academy graduate European fame.
Yet all these early works, whether “set pieces” produced for the Academy or intimate portraits done for his own personal satisfaction, share certain common features, a common sphere of interests and technical experimentation. The picture on a Gospel theme, The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter, is highly significant in this regard. It was painted for an Academy competition and earned Repin a gold medal and the associated travelling scholarship. In creating this monumental canvas, Repin conformed both to academic demands and, at the same time, transcended them. He perceived the “elevated style” cultivated by the Academy not as a kind of system of rules, but as an interesting tradition, bound up with the ability of art to attain a sublime, miraculous
