Ilya Repin retrospective at the Petit Palais
From 5 October 2021 to 23 January 2022, the Petit Palais in Paris presents the first retrospective in France dedicated to Ilya Repin, one of the great masters of Russian art.
Ilya Repin - Barge Haulers on the Volga - 1870
Source: Petit Palais, Paris. Image: Ilya Repin, "Barge Haulers on the Volga"), 1870-73. State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.
Ilya Repin (1844-1930) is perhaps the leading figure in 19th-century Russian painting, being to Russian Realism what Gustave Courbet was in France or Thomas Eakins in America. However, outside Russia his fame is nowhere near comparable to that of the great masters of 19th century Europe, such as the aforementioned Courbet. The Petit Palais in Paris is attempting in part to correct this with this major retrospective, which includes some 100 works from such important institutions as the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg and the Athenaum Art Museum in Helsinki.
Born in present-day Ukraine in 1844, Repin was the most notable of the Peredvizhniki, a group of Russian artists who developed a fully realist style of painting, but with a nationalist undertone that in some ways brought them closer to Romanticism. In the words of Inessa Kouteinikova, "at the heart of the Peredvizhniki reforms was the idea of creating a representative and accessible national art”. In the early 1870s, Repin travelled around the Volga region creating sketches of the landscapes and local life, which he would later use to create his first great masterpiece, “Barge Haulers on the Volga”, from the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
The retrospective at the Petit Palais also focuses on Repin's portraiture, ranging from intimate portraits of family members ("Portrait of Yury Repin", 1882) to portraits of celebrities such as Leo Tolstoy, and major official commissions such as "Alexander III Receiving the Elders of the Rural District" (1886), or the "Portrait of Nicholas II" (1896) and other important official projects.

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