Description:

Ilya Repin was the most gifted of the group known in Russia as "The Itinerants". When only twelve years old, he joined Ivan Bounakov's studio to learn the icon-painter's craft. Religious representations always remained of great importance for him. From 1864 to 1873 Repin studied at the Academy of the Arts in Saint Petersburg under Kramskoï. Repin also studied in Paris for two years, where he was strongly influenced by outdoor painting without, becoming an Impressionist, a style that he judged too distant from reality. Taken with French pictorial culture, he worked to understand its role in the evolution of contemporary art. Most of Repin's powerful work deals with the social dilemmas of Russian life in the nineteenth century. He established his reputation in 1873 with the celebrated picture Barge Haulers on the Volga, symbol of the oppressed Russian people pulling their chains. This struggle against the autocracy inspired many works. He also painted Russia's official history in...