Works by Ilya Repin

Ilya Repin, painter of Barge Haulers on the Volga, began his pictures with pencil or charcoal sketches, and the works below, drawings and paintings in about equal parts, are mostly portraits and scenes with people.

In 1876 his teacher Ivan Kramskoi wrote that Repin could paint a Russian peasant just as he really was. Mower, from that year, stands a barefoot man in a loose white shirt against a wash of green, holding his scythe. For his big canvases Repin made detailed studies first. In Young Boy Carrying an Icon, study, of 1880, the boy stands in profile against blue sky, the icon at his chest set down in loose, thick strokes.

He made six or seven sketches before each portrait. Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin (1855–1888), of 1884, leans over a desk of loose papers and turns his dark eyes straight out. Charcoal he often rubbed with a finger or an eraser for the shading he wanted, and in Portrait of the Actress Vera Pushkareva, drawn on canvas in 1899, the huge sleeves of her black dress are soft, smudged masses.

With Natalia Nordman he built a house at Kuokkala, in Finland, his full-time home and studio after 1907. Double Portrait of Natalia Nordmann and Ilya Repin, of 1903, puts them on a garden bench, he with pencil and papers, she leaning back in a wine-red jacket, one hand at her hair. After Finland's independence in 1917 the border closed, and Repin would not go back to Russia. Portrait of A. Gallen-Kallela, from 1920, works up the head and pipe in thick paint and leaves much of the body as loose brown lines on bare canvas.

Sources: Wikipedia, Finnish National Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.