Ilya Repin: 250 Paintings and Drawings

Ilya Repin was a leading Russian painter and sculptor of the Peredvizhniki artistic school. An important part of his work is dedicated to his native country, Ukraine. His realistic works often expressed great psychological depth. In 1870, Repin made his first sketches for Baurge Haulers on the Volga, while being on a boat trip. Throughout his career, Repin was drawn to the common people from whom he traced his origins. He frequently painted country folk, both Ukrainian and Russian, though in later years he also painted members of the Imperial Russian elite, the intelligentsia, and the aristocracy, including Tsar Nicholas II. He is the author of many portraits, but he never painted faces, he painted real people. Repin rarely painted historical paintings. The most popular in this genre is The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV. He never painted anything substantial on the subject of the 1917 revolutions or the Soviet experiment that followed.