Volga barge haulers made Russian realism impossible to ignore
Ilya Repin, 5 August 1844 to 29 September 1930, became nineteenth-century Russia's most famous painter with Barge Haulers on the Volga and processional crowds. An 1885 Ivan the Terrible canvas was pulled from show for shock; revolutions later drove him from the Academy he once taught.
Repin was born in August 1844 in Chuguev, a provincial town in the Kharkov Governorate that now lies in Ukraine. His father Yefim was a military settler who spent 27 years in an Uhlan regiment, fighting Persia, Turkey and Hungary, before trading horses; his mother Tatyana, a soldier's daughter, taught at the local school he entered at eleven. At thirteen he joined the workshop of the icon painter Ivan Bunakov, restoring old icons, and by sixteen he was travelling Voronezh province with an artists' cooperative painting churches.
He failed the entrance competition for the Imperial Academy of Arts in October 1863 but stayed in Saint Petersburg, took drawing classes in a rented room, and was admitted free of charge in January 1864. Ivan Kramskoi became his mentor, and in 1869 Job and His Brothers won a second-class gold medal. A sketching trip to the Volga in 1870 led Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich to commission Barge Haulers on the Volga, finished in 1873; shown in Vienna, it brought him his first international notice. He called himself a peasant, a retired soldier's son, and argued that art should now speak for the peasant.
An Academy grant took him through Austria and Italy to Paris, where he rented rooms on the rue Veron in Montmartre and stayed two years. He was in the city for the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874 and borrowed their open-air method at Veules-les-Roses, yet felt their work lacked moral purpose. Back in Russia by 1876, he settled in Moscow and joined the Wanderers, a group committed to realist, engaged, specifically Russian art.
His 1885 painting of Ivan the Terrible killing his own son in rage caused such a scandal that it was taken down. In 1898 he and his second wife built The Penates at Kuokkala in Finland, now a museum. He resigned from the Academy in 1905 after the government crushed street protests, welcomed the February Revolution but recoiled from Bolshevik terror, and, cut off once Finland became independent, died there in 1930 at 86.
Source: Ilya Repin
