Life and Work
Repin was born in the town of Chuguyev, near Kharkov Governorate, in the heart of the historical region called Sloboda Ukraine. His parents were Russian military settlers. In 1866, after apprenticeship with a local icon painter named Bunakov and preliminary study of portrait painting, he went to Saint Petersburg and was shortly admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts as a student. From 1873 to 1876 on the Academy's allowance, Repin sojourned in Italy and lived in Paris, where he was exposed to French Impressionist painting, which had a lasting effect upon his use of light and colour. His style was to remain closer to that of the old European masters, especially Rembrandt, and he never embraced Impressionism.
Throughout his career, Repin was drawn to the common people from whom he traced his origins. He frequently painted country folk, both Ukrainian and Russian, though in later years he also painted members of the Imperial Russian elite, the intelligentsia, and the aristocracy, including Tsar Nicholas II.
Read more about this topic: Ilya Repin
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