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Ilya Efimovich Repin was born
in Chuguev, in the Ukraine, in the family of
a soldier-settler. He received his first lessons
in art in 1858, when he started working for
I. M. Bunakov, a talented icon painter from
Chuguev. Commissions for portraits and religious
paintings allowed Repin to collect enough money
to go to St. Petersburg with the goal of entering
the Academy of Arts. He arrived in the capital
in 1863 and enrolled in the School of Drawing
attached to the Society for the Encouragement
of the Arts. Working with Kramskoi, in a year
the young artist developed his skills sufficiently
to be accepted to the Academy.
In May 1870 Repin went on a boat trip down the
Volga during which he made sketches for his
Barge-haulers on the Volga (The Volga Boatmen).
A year later the artist finished his schooling
at the Academy. His graduation work, The Resurrection
of Jairus' Daughter, won the Gold Medal and
a six-year scholarship (including three years
of travel abroad). After traveling through Europe
and staying in Paris (1872-76), Repin returned
to Russia. He spent a year in Chuguev, making
sketches for his famous Religious Procession
in the Kursk Province.
Self Portrait,
1887
The next six years (1876-82) Repin lived in
Moscow, trying to get along with the Academy,
the Mamontov circle, and his old friends Stasov
and Kramskoi. Tired of their constant squabbles,
he moved to St. Petersburg. He made several
bio trips to Europe—in 1883, 89, 94, and
1900. He taught at the St. Petersburg Academy
(1894-1907) and was an influential member of
the Wanderers. In 1900, during a trip to Paris,
Repin met Natalia Nordman, the "love of
his life" (Repin was separated from his
wife), and moved to her home, Penaty (Penates),
in Kuokkala (Finland), located about an hour's
train ride from St. Petersburg. Together, they
organized the famous Wednesdays at the Penaty
which attracted the creative elite of Russia.
When Nordman died in 1914, she left the estate
to the Academy, but Repin occupied it for the
next sixteen years. Handicapped by the atrophy
of his right hand, Repin could not produce works
of the same quality as those, which brought
him fame. Although he trained himself to paint
with his left hand, he lived his last years
under a constant financial strain. Since the
artist did not accept the Revolution of 1917,
he did not want to go back to Russia, even though
in 1926 a delegation sent by the Ministry of
Education of the Soviet Union helped him financially
and tried to entice him to return. To acknowledge
and commemorate Repin's artistic achievement,
in 1948 Kuokkala was renamed Repino.
As Fan and Stephen Jan Parker note in their
monograph on Repin, "Western art historians
and critics have minimized Repin's achievements
and contributions either because his very "national"
identity has not been grasped, or because—and
this is most likely—Repin was neither a
technical innovator nor the creator of a school
of painting. bioover, he was a realist and not
a modernist. Yet in the esteem of both prerevolutionary
and Soviet Russia, Repin occupies a position
alongside Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Musorgsky
and Rimsky-Korsakov.
This first comprehensive survey of Ilya Repinís work
to be overseen by a Western art historian features a wealth
of previously unseen paintings, eye-catching and dramatic works
that bring to life Russian society in the last years of the
tsars. Repin, who lived from 1844 to 1930, was the finest and
most celebrated painter of his generation, and an important
influence in shaping a distinctly Russian school within nineteenth-century
Realism. His often-controversial works addressed subjects including
the hard lives of the peasants, the fates of revolutionary activists,
loaded episodes of Russian history and some of the nationís
greatest cultural figures, many of whom he counted as personal
friends, including Tolstoy, Musorgsky and Gorky. His vibrant,
colorful and topical canvases offer a fascinating panorama of
the issues that were swirling in the minds of his contemporaries,
and an unusual view of all strata of life during this crucial
period of historical change.
Biography of Russia's foremost 19th-century artist, whose great
talent established realism as the national painting style, charts
his eventful career, while drawing attention to distinctive
features of Russian artistic culture between the 1860s and 1920s.
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Ilya Repin
by Yelena Kirillina; et al Karpenko – Hardcover Publisher:
Aurora Art Publishers (1985)
Ilya Repin: 1844-1930 
by Christian Brinton – Paperback: 82 pages Publisher: Adamant
Media Corporation (October 17, 2006)
Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (Studies of the
Harriman Institute)
