Presidential Librarym commemorates 180th anniversary of artist Ilya Repin

"The skill is such that it is invisible!" - Lev Tolstoy once said about one of Ilya Repin's paintings. This skill was precisely what distinguished the artist, whose 180th anniversary is celebrated on August 5th.

Ilya Repin's gallery of images is amazing. His large-scale compositions, such as "Boatmen on the Volga" and "Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan," are impressive. Additionally, his portrait gallery of famous figures such as writers Lev Tolstoy and Leonid Andreev, actress Pelageya Strepetova, and composers Modest Mussorgsky and Dmitry Mendeleev, as well as chemist Nikolai Pirogov and surgeon Nikolay Ge, are also noteworthy.

"Repin is a truly remarkable figure," the artist and art critic Igor Grabar wrote in his book Repin, published in 1933 as part of the "Lives of Wonderful People" series. He described Repin as an individual with an unusually diverse and contradictory personality, filled with feelings, thoughts, and statements that often led to confusion and even despair among his biographers. This was especially true for Repin, who was driven by intuitive impulses and possessed an infinite and rare personal charm.

Repin had an amazing talent - he was able to genuinely admire people. He generally loved talent in others, and the word "mediocrity" was one of the worst swear words in his vocabulary. This was written by Korney Chukovsky, who knew the artist for nearly a quarter of a century and wrote the preface to the book of Repin's memoirs, The Far Near (1944).

Chukovsky described Repin's ability to appreciate others' talents as being combined with the greatest, most natural modesty. The artist described himself as a "hardworking mediocre who made a lot of mistakes," and admitted that he was one of those people who didn't recognize their own talent in controversial matters.

Repin admitted that when he paints a portrait of someone, he falls in love with that person for a short period of time. He feels "a tenfold sense of benevolence towards them and some special, respectful tenderness." Repin was able to appreciate not only the physical features of the person, but also their character, "which revealed itself to him during that brief period of infatuation."

Lev Tolstoy in his fields or in his office at Yasnaya Polyana, Mikhail Glinka composing an opera, Anton Rubinstein conducting - all these extraordinary people were engaged in their daily activities in Repin's paintings. Athanasius Fet, who impressed Repin with his "ugly and truthful" appearance, and the "yellow-faced old man" Pisemsky, and the emaciated Musorgsky, had an ordinary, unremarkable appearance... "To understand nature in its essence, in its character - this is the main goal of the artist, whose solution determines everything. No idealization, no corrections, no nonsense!" - the art critic Nikolai Mashkovets wrote about the artist's work in the 1943 edition of I. Repin: A Brief Sketch of Life and Work (1844-1930).

In 1915, Korney Chukovsky introduced Mayakovsky to Repin, who treated with "fiery hatred" a group of artists he called "Futurists". Chukovsky described this encounter in his book "Repin, Bitter, Mayakovsky, Bryusov (1940)".

Although paintings and portraits came to Repin through great effort, drawing was like breathing for him. And it is unlikely, as Korney Chukovsky wrote, that there was a happier man on earth than Repin when he quickly sculpted reliefs of human faces with a pencil on paper. At that moment, there was an expression of joy in his eyes as if he had waited all his life to create that particular face.

When, with age, the artist felt that he could not hold a brush with his right hand, he began to learn to write with his left hand so as not to break away from painting for a minute. And when, due to senile weakness, Ilya could no longer hold the palette in his hands, he hung it like a stone around his neck with special straps and worked with this stone from morning to night…

You can learn more about the life and work of the Russian painter, professor, and full member of the Imperial Academy of Arts thanks to the electronic collection of the Presidential Library Ilya Repin (1844-1930). The collection includes digital copies of books, archival documents, letters and memoirs of the artist, articles from periodicals devoted to his life and work, as well as photographs of the early 20th century, postcards and reproductions of paintings.