Ilya Repin

Ilya Repin painted Russia arguing with itself. Barge Haulers on the Volga, finished when he was twenty nine, shows eleven men roped to a boat, each face individual, and it made his reputation as much for its politics as its handling.

He trained at the St Petersburg academy and joined the Peredvizhniki, who took exhibitions to provincial cities rather than waiting for audiences to come to them. The historical paintings, particularly Ivan the Terrible with the son he has just killed, were considered so disturbing that the Tsar banned public display of that one.

He painted almost everyone worth painting in Russian culture: Tolstoy repeatedly, Mussorgsky days before his death, Rimsky-Korsakov. After 1917 his home at Kuokkala fell inside newly independent Finland, and he stayed there, declining Soviet invitations to return.