On his return to Russia, as if to prove a point after his travels, Repin embarked upon a renewed engagement with the country’s history in his more public-facing work, focusing on key moments and figures from the nation’s past. Although the young Repin could hardly have foreseen it, his own life would take a similar course in the years after 1917. Turgenev himself, painted by Repin in 1874 as a commission from Pavel Tretyakov (although neither patron nor sitter were happy with the product) was in many ways the archetypal Russian abroad, avoiding returning ‘home’ to evade the Tsarist regime’s scrutiny, and living in self-imposed exile in a dacha outside the city.
Living in Montmartre between 1873-6, Repin slotted into an already-established Russian community in Paris, where the Cathedrale Sainte Alexander Nevsky had recently been consecrated and where artists, writers, and political émigrés met in each other’s homes, in cafés and the officers of newspapers, or in the ‘Bibliothèque Russe’ that Ivan Turgenev founded in 1875. Ilya Repin, ‘The Turf Bench’ (1876, State Russian Museum, St.
The content of a painting like ‘The Turf Bench’ (1876) may be Russian in its setting and figures, but in style it owes as much to Eduard Manet’s 1863 ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ as it does to Repin’s early work. Although technically prohibited from doing so by the terms of his travel stipend from the Imperial Academy of Arts, he nonetheless exhibited ‘A Parisian Café’ at the 1875 Salon before embarking on a summer tour of Normandy, where working en plein air gave his painting a much more Impressionistic and sketch-like appearance. On arrival in Paris he was initially sceptical as to the merits of the new style of painting, critical of the ‘tricks’ of the Impressionists even if he appreciated their ideas of pictorial content and narrative, but he was always alert to the subject matter that the city gave him.
That the young painter who had produced the ‘Barge Haulers of the Volga’ in 1873 should, two years later, have completed a large tableau of Parisian café customers reminds us that Repin saw travel as a way of finding not only new subjects, but new ways of representing them. Currently drawing in large crowds of Parisian visitors as it enters its closing weeks, this is truly a landmark display of the work of a painter much better known in Russia than he is elsewhere.Īlongside these justly celebrated Russian images, however, this exhibition reminds us that Repin was a frequent visitor to the French capital, and seeing his art in the home of Impressionism locates this Russian soul within a more cosmopolitan nineteenth century culture. The vast ‘Ceremonial Meeting of the State Council on 7th May 1901’ hasn’t made the trip, although some of the preparatory sketches for the group portrait have done so. The exhibition is only slightly smaller in size than its 2019 iteration in Moscow’s New Tretyakov Gallery and St Petersburg’s State Russian Museum. In this rich survey of his career, with many paintings travelling to Paris for the first time, we find almost all of the great set-piece works, from the ‘Barge Haulers of the Volga’ to the ‘Religious Procession in Kursk Province’ and the ‘Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Sultan’ to name but a few. Posters for the Ilya Repin exhibition at the Petit Palais, Paris, refer to him as a ‘painter of the Russian soul’ and there is certainly ample evidence of his capacity to both record and construct a particular sense of ‘Russian’ identity and culture.
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