He is also known for the revealing portraits he made of the leading Russian literary and artistic figures of his time, including Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Pavel Tretyakov, and especially Leo Tolstoy, with whom he had a long friendship.

He failed at his first effort to enter the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, but went to the city anyway in 1863, audited courses, and won his first prizes in 1869 and 1871.

The Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich awarded him a commission for a large scale painting, The Barge Haulers of the Volga, which launched his career.

[9] He suffered one setback in 1885 when his history portrait of Ivan the Terrible killing his own son in a rage caused a scandal, resulting in the painting being removed from exhibition.

[10] Repin was born on 24 July 1844 in the town of Chuguev, in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, in the heart of the historical region of Sloboda Ukraine.

When he returned to Saint Petersburg, the quality of his Volga boatmen drawings won him a commission from Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich for a large scale painting on the subject.

It also earned him a grant from the Academy of Fine Arts which allowed him to make an extended tour of several months to Austria, then Italy, and finally in 1873, to Paris.

His major Russian work created in Paris was Sadko (1876), a mystical allegory of an undersea kingdom, which included elements of Art Nouveau.

[22] Though he admired some impressionist techniques, especially their depictions of light and color, he felt their work lacked moral or social purpose, key factors in his own art.

He moved to Moscow that year, and produced a wide variety of works including portraits of the painters Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Shishkin.

The style of the Wanderers was resolutely realistic, patriotic, and politically engaged, determined to break with classical models and to create a specifically Russian art.

[23] Repin created a series of major historical works, including the Religious Procession in Kursk Governorate (1883), which was presented at the 12th annual exposition of the Wanderers.

It was notable both for its extraordinary crowd of realistic figures, including surly policemen, weary monks, children and beggars, each expressing a vivid personality.

It depicts The daughter of Tsar Alexis who became regent of Russia after the death of her father, but then was deposed from power in 1689 and locked away in a convent by her half-brother, Peter the Great.

(1884-1888),(Tretyakov Gallery) is a notable and subtle historical work of the period, depicting a young man, a former "narodniki" or revolutionary, emaciated and frail from prison and exile, returning unexpectedly to his family.

The story is told by the different expressions on the faces of his family and small details, such as the portraits of Tsar Alexander III and of favourite Russian poets on the wall.

Despite his age, Tolstoy went horseback riding with Repin, ploughed fields, cleared paths of brush and hiked through the countryside for nine hours, all the while discussing philosophy and morals.

Other composers painted by Repin included Alexander Glazunov who had just completed Borodin's opera "Prince Igor", and Anton Rubinstein the founder of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory of Music.

The painting depicts an apocryphal event in 1678, when a group of cossacks supposedly amused themselves by drafting a highly insulting letter to the Turkish sultan, addressing him as "The Grand Imbecile".

Most of the models were faculty members from the Academy of Arts, and had a variety of nationalities, including Russians, Ukrainians, a Cossack student, Greeks, and Poles.

In 1898 he traveled to the Holy Land, and painted the icon Carrying the Cross for the Russian Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Jerusalem.

In 1899 he acquired land near a village of Kuokkala, about forty kilometres north of St. Petersburg, and they built a country house, called the Penates, which became his home for the next thirty years.

[41][42][43] It was a rather eccentric estate, including a studio covered with a pyramidal lantern roof, a landscape garden with a "Pushkin alley" of trees, a multicoloured music kiosk in the Egyptian style, and a telescope overlooking the Gulf of Finland.

The movements toward democracy in the early 20th century inspired Repin, he joined the Constitutional Democratic Party, was offered the rank of Councillor of State, and was invited to take a seat in the Duma, the national assembly.

In 1909 he painted Gogol Burning the Manuscript of the Second Part of Dead Souls, and in 1910, portraits of Pyotr Stolypin, and the children's writer and poet Korney Chukovsky.

[56] Repin's search for truth and for an ideal led him in various directions artistically, influenced by hidden aspects of social and spiritual experiences as well as national culture.

No Russian painter of the 19th or 20th century was more skilled at genre painting, portraying scenes of daily life in a sympathetic and perceptive way, giving each character a distinct purpose and personality.

[citation needed] He illustrated novels such as Taras Bulba and Sorochinsky Fair by Nikolai Gogol (1872–82) and Zaporissya in the remains of ancient legends and people by Dmytro Yavornytsky (1887), and drew numerous sketches of architecture as well as different popular aspects of Ukrainian culture.

[58] In one of his last letters he wrote: "kind, dear compatriots [...] I ask you to believe in the sense of my devotion and endless regret that I can't move to live in a sweet, joyful Ukraine [...] Loving you from the childhood, Ilya Repin".

[56] Repin's search for truth and for an ideal led him in various directions artistically, influenced by hidden aspects of social and spiritual experiences as well as national culture.