5.08.1844 – 29.09.1930

Probably, there was no more famous and more quoted artist in Russia than Ilya Yefimovich Repin. From the school bench we know his works – “Burlaki on the Volga”, “Do not wait,” “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan,” “Sadko.” The artist was subject to all genres – this is historical paintings, and portraits, and genre paintings, and landscapes. The breadth of interests, responsiveness of talent – the main properties of the creative nature of Repin. At one and the same time, he was able to work with different things and in a different manner. Contemporaries even rebuked Repin in artistic indiscrimination: “Today he writes from the Gospel, tomorrow a folk scene on a fashionable idea, then a fantastic picture of the epic …”. However, for the descendants, Repin is the key figure of the realm of realism.

The future artist was born on August 5, 1844 in the small town of Chuguev in Ukraine, in the family of a retired soldier. Early discovering the penchant for drawing as a teenager, Ilya Repin settled in the icon painting workshop, and at the age of sixteen the young man left his workshop and his parents’ home, joining the nomadic icon-painting cooperative.

In the summer of 1863 the artel workers worked in Voronezh province not far from Ostrogozhsk, the town where the artist Ivan Kramskoy was born. From local masters Repin learned that their countryman, who had already received a small gold medal for the painting “Moses exudes water from the rock”, left his native place seven years ago and went to study at the Academy of Arts. The stories of the Ostrogozhts served as a stimulus for sharp changes in life: in the fall, having collected all the money earned over the summer months, Ilya Efimovich went to Petersburg.

The first of Repin’s famous paintings “Burlaki on the Volga” made a sensation in the art community. The artist was able to represent the genre in a monumental way. The picture is constructed in such a way that the procession moves from the depth to the viewer, but at the same time the composition is read as a frieze, so that the figures do not obscure each other. Repin succeeded in combining the conventionality of the picture form with amazing natural convincingness.

Ilya Repin showed himself not only as a painter. He was a talented teacher – the head of the workshop (1894-1907) and the rector (1898-1899) of the Academy of Arts, at the same time taught at the workshop workshop Tenisheva; among his students – BM Kustodiev and IE Grabar. He also gave private lessons to VA Serov.

The artist lived a long life, the life of a man completely devoted to his work. Repin died at an advanced age, in 1930, and until the last years of his did not let go of the brush.