Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/259

Rh of his day to turn to themes of general interest, though he does this in his later paintings: "The Duel" and "What Boundless Space!" Only very recently Repin exhibited a canvas depicting the scenes which took place on the Petrograd streets on October 17, 1905, the memorable day when the ill-fated Russian constitution was granted to the land.

In this painting Repin demonstrated again that consummate artistic skill in handling a seething, crowding, swarming mass of humanity, which makes him a great painter of gregariousness. But he is also a remarkable portraitist, initiated into the mystery of what forms the individuality of a human being and able to seize the most characteristic expression of a human face. His portraits reveal most completely the exquisite precision and fresh vigor of his design. Repin's power of characterization is seen at its best in his sketches. Some critics, Alexander Benois, for example, do not hesitate to prefer them to the rest of his work. One of Repin's earliest paintings decorating the concert-hall of the Slav Bazaar, Moscow, consists of a series of portraits of RusianRussian [sic], Polish, and Bohemian musicians, and his recent painting of the plenary session of the Council of the Empire contains upward of eighty likenesses. To enumerate all his sitters would be to make a roll-call of the leaders of modern Russia. All the world is familiar with Repin's portraits of Tolstoy, who was to the painter a friend and a spiritual master. They show the Old Man of Yasnaya Polyana now tilling the soil, now sitting in his study, now standing in his garden with his hands in his girdle. In speaking of these portraits, Prince Bodijar Karageorgevich remarks: "The genius of the painter interprets the genius of the poet, and the calm and simple picture dwells in the high places of memory of those who have looked upon it, in the lofty sphere where the beautiful alone is loved and cherished."

One of the peculiarities of Russian realism in art, says Alexander Benois, is the weakness that the adepts of painting based on observation, have for historical subjects. This applies directly to Repin. He passes with ease from a village hunch-back to a queen of Muscovia, and from the Nihilists to the Cossacks of the sixteenth century. And, naturally enough, it is in dealing with historical themes that his art frees itself from the doctrinaire purpose and reaches a higher aesthetic plane.

Repin's most popular and outstanding historical paintings are: "Tsar Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan Ivanovich," and "The Zaporogian Cossacks' Jeering Reply to the Sultan