Ilya Repin Prints

About Ilya Repin

Ilya Repin was born in 1844 at Chuhuiv near Kharkov, the son of a military settler, and began as an icon painter before entering the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1864. Barge Haulers on the Volga, painted between 1870 and 1873 after a summer on the river, made him famous at twenty-nine. After three years in Paris he joined the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, whose travelling exhibitions carried realist painting across Russia, and became its leading figure: Religious Procession in Kursk Governorate, They Did Not Expect Him, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan and the Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, each a crowd of exactly observed faces. He painted Tolstoy, Mussorgsky and almost every notable Russian of his age. From 1903 he lived at Kuokkala in Finland, which became foreign territory after 1917; he refused invitations to return and died there in 1930.