an attempt to put down on canvas his impressions of French life and French painting.
By the summer of 1876 Repin was home once more. He settled for a short period near St Petersburg and produced the beautiful, lyrical painting On the Turf Seat. This was in a sense a summary of his Paris experiences and the most impressionistic work Repin ever produced. The intimate motif (the artist’s children, his wife and her relations out for a breath of fresh air) allowed Repin to convey the poetry of the summer landscape on a still, warm day.
Job and his Friends, 1869.
Oil on canvas, 133 × 199 cm.
The Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
In the autumn, the artist returned to his home town, Chuguyev, but after a year he moved to Moscow. He was a frequent guest at Abramtsevo, an estate near Moscow, where he was one of the most active members of the “Mamontov circle”, named after its founder, the famous patron of the arts, Savva Mamontov. Many great Russian artists, including Victor Vasnetsov, Vasily Polenov, Valentin Serov and Mikhail Vrubel, were active in what was becoming one of the centres of Russian cultural life. The circle embraced a whole range of creative activities – painting, theatre, music, folk art – and was free of that slightly ascetic truth seeking characteristic of the young “rebels” of 1863 in St Petersburg. The environment of the Abramtsevo colony and acquaintance with the life of the local area further stimulated Repin’s full-blooded response to reality. Here he found fresh fodder for his constant desire to strengthen the link between his own creative personality and the everyday existence of the people. The most significant and productive period in Repin’s career began when he moved to St Petersburg in 1882. In the following decade, he produced most of his famous works. He became a member of the Itinerants’ Society (the Society for Itinerant Art Exhibitions), a group of artists which brought together all the main currents in Russian realist art of the second half of the nineteenth century, and which played a considerable role in democratic culture in Russia. Itinerant exhibitions caused the visitors to think about themselves and the general lot of their country. By this time the picture of the world which art was presenting had lost its Romantic light-heartedness, its wilful egocentricity. The theme of destiny became the religious and philosophical-cum-moral orientation in the world depicted, the core which shaped the whole. This theme was capable of drawing on ideas of social determinism as well the great mysteries of existence in all its different forms, from the national and historic to the domestic and the personal.
St Nicholas Saves Three Innocents from Death, 1888.
Oil on canvas, 215 × 196 cm.
The Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Get Thee Behind Me Satan! (sketch), 1890–1900.
Oil on cardbord, 21.7 × 40.5 cm.
The Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
On each occasion, the appearance of Repin’s works at the annual exhibitions of the society became a social and artistic event. In his pictures, or at least in his most important ones, Repin tackled problems which were of concern to the progressive circles of Russia. The artist’s constant desire was to understand the Russian mode of life and to interpret it in his own way; to show “the peculiarities of Russian tastes, images and notions, in fact, to do something which has never been done before”.[2] Two aspects of Repin’s talent should be singled out above all. They are, firstly, an innate feeling for the life of ordinary people, for their everyday concerns, their joys and sorrows, and, secondly, a persistent search for “truth”, for the meaning of human existence. Repin was capable of dashing off dozens of sketches for his own pleasure, deriving enjoyment from everyday scenes or the expressive possibilities of objects. But on the other hand, he would sometimes paint one figure several times before arriving at a solution which satisfied him. This was true of the face of the main figure in Unexpected Return, through whom Repin tried to convey the moral and philosophical content of the scene.
Religious Procession in Kursk Province, 1880–1883.
Oil on canvas, 175 × 280 cm.
The Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow.
Pilgrim (study for Procession amongst the Oak Trees), 1881.
Oil on canvas, 40.5 × 26 cm.
Savitsky Art Gallery, Penza.
Though he would often, as did his colleagues Vasnetsov and Surikov, glance backward across the surging centuries for some picturesque setting, never after his apprentice days did he choose a subject that was not thoroughly Muscovite. Whatever else it may have been, the art of Repin was, and continued to be throughout his career, essentially nationalistic in aim and appeal. It is absorbing to follow from canvas to canvas the unfolding of Repin’s pictorial power. His method is the reverse of impressionism. His principal works are not the result of a single, swift transcription of something vividly seen or spontaneously apprehended. They are the outcome of prolonged study and adjustment. As many as a hundred preliminary sketches were made for The Cossacks’ Reply, of which, during an interval of some ten years, he painted three separate versions. The theme in fact haunted him in the same manner as the great romanticist Bocklin lived for so long under the spell of his Island of the Dead. Repin was never satisfied with the result of his efforts. He constantly strives to attain more effective grouping and arrangement, and more eloquent colouristic power. While based upon direct observation, the larger realistic and historical compositions appear to assume their final form in response to some inner pictorial necessity.
These qualities of Repin’s realism were fully revealed in the works during the Chuguyev and Moscow periods of his career. With all the energy of a man returning to his native element, Repin seized on many different aspects of a world he had known since childhood. Some of the works of this time remained in sketch form (In a Volost Administration Office,), whereas others penetrated so deeply into the artist’s creative consciousness that they reappeared over the following decades as independent works, enriched by the artist’s spiritual and professional experience. Although the subject-matter of these works – peasant Russia – remained all-important, one could nonetheless distinguish new aspects on every occasion.
The Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878 furnished him with several themes, and in what is known as his nihilist cycle, comprising Putting a Propagandist Under Arrest, and Unexpected Return, he portrayed with penetrating truth and intensity that smouldering social volcano which has been responsible for so many decades of heroism and heartbreak. Among the works of this period are two that merit special consideration: Vechornitsy, or, as it is popularly called, Ukrainian Peasant Gathering, and the Religious Procession in Kursk Province, which was later supplemented by a somewhat similar Procession. Nowhere does Repin’s Ukrainian origin betray itself more sympathetically than in his picturing of these simple-hearted merrymakers who gather at a humble traktir (Russian tea) to pass the night before their wedding dancing to the tune of violin, pipe, and balalaika. In Procession, with its struggling, seething mass of humanity – its obese, gold-robed priests, benighted peasants, wretched beggars and cripples, cruel-mouthed officials, and inflated rural dignitaries, Repin seems to have offered us a pictorial synthesis of Russia. While a scene one might witness any day on the dust-laden highways of the southern districts, the picture possesses a deeper significance. In essence it is a condemnation, and, like the Burlaki, it is all the more severe because it is clothed in the irrefragable language of fact.
