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. Portrait of the composer Modest Mussorgsky, 1881, Oil on canvas, 69 × 57 cm, The Russian Museum, St Petersburg 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. 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. 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. “As in life” is an expression often used to describe the distinctive quality of Repin’s work. 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.

It does not particularly 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. But the deep sense of purpose in his aesthetics went further than this, for he possessed first and foremost the great artistic gift to sense the spirit of the age and to see the way in which this spirit was reflected in the lives and characters of individuals. As is the case with many great masters, Repin had certain favourite subjects, motifs and images, and a limited circle of people whose portraits he especially liked to paint. This integrity was inseparably bound up with the general character of Russian artistic culture in the second half of the nineteenth century striving to realise its social and historical mission. The creative world of Repin possessed a special spiritual integrity, which existed not despite of, but because of the diversity of the artist’s creative goals and the breadth of his grasp of reality. When Repin produced his first independent works, it became clear that a form of art was taking root in Russia which was imbued with civic feeling and akin to the work of such major realists as Courbet in France, Menzel in Germany, and Munkacsy in Hungary. They recognized in his work the beginnings of a creative search which was to enrich the general development of critical realism in European art. Even early on in his career, the artist’s pictures attracted the attention of critics at international exhibitions. For twenty-five years, every new picture by Repin was awaited with bated breath, and the publication of his essays, especially those written at the turn of the century, always caused a stir in the cultural life of the country.Īcutely aware of the social problems of his day and in tune with the restless spirit of the times, Repin produced works that contained all the essential features of late-nineteenth-century Russian realism and it was in part thanks to him that Russian art came to play a significant role in European culture.

Repin’s position in the world of pictorial art was comparable to that of Leo Tolstoy in the world of letters.

Ilya Repin enjoyed more fame and recognition during his lifetime than any other Russian artist born in the nineteenth century.

Russian portrait painter