Ilya Repin

Repin was born in Chuguev in 1844, son of a former cavalry soldier turned horse trader, and started painting icons at sixteen. He failed his first try at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg but went anyway in 1863, audited classes, and won prizes by 1869. A tour along the Volga in 1872 yielded drawings that earned him a commission from Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich for Barge Haulers on the Volga, the canvas that made his name. He spent two years in Paris and Normandy absorbing Impressionist technique, then returned to produce Religious Procession in Kursk Province and a gallery of portraits - Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tretyakov, and his close friend Leo Tolstoy. In 1885 his Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan caused such scandal it was pulled from exhibition, but commissions kept coming. He built a country house called The Penates in Kuokkala, Finland, in 1898, quit the Academy in 1905 after the repression of street protests, and welcomed the February Revolution before recoiling at Bolshevik terror. When Finland declared independence in 1917, the new border trapped him; he never returned to Russia, not even for his own 1925 retrospective in Leningrad. He