Eastern Encounters: Ilia Repin's Orientalist Aesthetics Abroad and at Home

This essay examines Ilia Repin's sustained engagement with European Orientalist painting and its impact on his oeuvre. Through close readings of three of his major works, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876), Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885), and Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880–91), it argues that Repin deployed Eastern motifs in order to unsettle entrenched East/West and self/other binaries that were prevalent in the Russian imperial context. A celebrated figure of the Russian national school, Repin was born and raised in Ukraine, and frequently turned to Ukrainian themes and subjects in his art. Considering Russia's turbulent political atmosphere in the 1880s and 1890s, and the evolving separation of Ukrainian and Russian imperial identities during this time, this essay posits that Repin harnessed the Orientalist idiom as a means to critique the Russian state, and to articulate an anti-imperial and anti-autocratic position.

Detail of Ilia Repin, Woman with a Dagger, 1875 (plate 6).

Since the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Ilia Repin (1844–1930) has been widely celebrated as a leading figure of the Russian national school of art. Hundreds of books, journal articles, and anthologies have been published on his long and prolific career. Many of these publications, such as the monographs Russia on Canvas: Ilya Repin (1980), Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (1990), and The Russian Vision: The Art of llya Repin (2006), as well as the exhibition catalogues Ilya Repin: Russia's Secret (2001), Auf der Suche nach Russland. Der Maler Ilja Repin (2003), and more recently Ilia Repin, 1844–1930 (2019) and Ilya Répine: 1844–1930. Peindre l'âme russe (2021), have all specifically foregrounded the artist's Russian heritage.1 Characteristically, in her introductory essay to the catalogue for the 2019 Repin retrospective exhibition organized by the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, curator Tatiana Iudenkova writes:

Today Ilia Efimovich Repin is considered to be one of the most important national artists of the nineteenth century (if not the most important), while his art is its own genre of ‘encyclopedia of Russian life’, which contains diverse images of Russia – peasant and aristocratic, folkloric and tsarist, revolutionary and artistic.2

Repin, however, was born and raised in Ukraine. He maintained close links to his Ukrainian homeland throughout his lifetime and frequently turned to Ukrainian themes and subjects in his paintings. With some notable exceptions, such as Thomas Prymak's seminal article, ‘A Painter from Ukraine: Ilya Repin’, the persistent categorization of Repin as an unequivocally ‘Russian’ artist who portrayed exclusively ‘national’ subject matter has long obscured both his complex and hybrid identity as a nineteenth-century imperial subject and his sustained interest in regional and cosmopolitan themes and diverse artistic styles and genres.3

Taking its cue from recent calls to decentre and decolonize Russian and Eastern European art-historical narratives, the present article explores questions of race, ethnicity, and empire in some of Repin's most famous works alongside those that have received less scholarly attention.4 In doing so, it not only challenges persisting hegemonic Russian narratives and cultural myths about nineteenth-century artistic production, but also draws attention to the ways in which artists such as Repin questioned, contested, and revised the imperial status quo while being simultaneously deeply embedded in official state institutions and the Russian art establishment. It thus raises important questions about the ways in which the separate art histories of nations such as Ukraine might be productively decoupled from those of the imperial centre, while still acknowledging their historical entanglement.

Repin's three-year sojourn in Paris from 1873 to 1876 as a pensioner of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg has long been the subject of fervent scholarly interest. Discussions of Repin's stay in Paris have typically centred on the artist's formative encounter with the French avant-garde, and especially Edouard Manet and the ‘Impressionalists’ as Repin called them.5 Most notably, David Jackson has dedicated a series of publications to the various ways in which Repin had gleaned important stylistic and thematic lessons from the French modernists, as reflected in his Parisian works such as Portrait of Vera Repina (1875; State Russian Museum, St Petersburg), The Road to Montmartre (1875; State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), and A Parisian Café (1875, Museum of Avant-Garde Mastery, Moscow), which he exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1875.6 However, less attention has been paid to Repin's sustained engagement with European Salon painting – especially the Orientalist genre – and the ways in which it had made a lasting impact on his artistic practice both conceptually and materially.

Accordingly, this article explores Repin's nascent interest in and experimentation with the Orientalist mode both during his stay in Paris and after his return to Russia. More specifically, it analyses the ways in which Eastern motifs and subjects came to inform Repin's paintings of Russian and Ukrainian history and folklore and became intimately intertwined with Slavic themes, resulting in a number of hybrid works that complicate the notions of native and foreign, local and global, self and other, and Slavophilia and Orientalia. Within the context of Russia's turbulent political atmosphere in the 1880s and 1890s, and the evolving separation of Ukrainian and Russian imperial identities during this time, this article argues that Repin deployed the Orientalist idiom to subtly critique the Russian state and to articulate an anti-imperial and anti-autocratic position.

Much like their Western European contemporaries, many artists in the Russian imperial orbit were equally seduced by the exotic appeal of the ‘inscrutable Orient’ throughout the nineteenth century.7 From Ivan Aivazovsky's moonlit views of Constantinople, to Vasilii Vereshchagin's controversial Turkestan series (1868–72), and late nineteenth-century Salon paintings such as Valerii Iakobi's Oriental Beauty with a Sword (1881; Private Collection, Moscow) and Aleksandr Russov's Bought for the Harem (1891; State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), Orientalism developed into a recognizable subgenre in the Russian visual and decorative arts. Virtually all of Repin's closest friends and associates had travelled to the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the Russian empire's own Orient – namely Central Asia, Crimea, and the Caucasus – and had depicted these different regions in their artworks.8 Repin himself visited the Caucasus in 1881, Crimea in 1890, and Palestine in 1898. In fact, even before his first trip abroad, Repin already began to experiment with the Orientalist genre in a number of artworks produced during his student years at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg.

One such example is his 1869 painting on the biblical subject of Job and his Friends (State Russian Museum, St Petersburg) (plate 1). Set in a desert landscape, against rugged mountains and a camel caravan, Job's entourage is rendered in colourful Oriental garb, replete with ornately decorated weapons and elaborate jewellery. In particular, the two standing figures on the right-hand side of the painting are shown as racially and ethnically ‘other’ – one has pronounced Semitic features, while the other typifies the black Moor. The painting proved to be a success at the academy and Repin was awarded a small gold medal for it. The painter and art historian, Igor Grabar, described it as a compelling visualization of the ‘Classical Orient’ of biblical times and maintained that the ‘racial, oriental-exotic characterization’ of the human figures was especially interesting and effectively executed.9During this time, Repin – like many of his fellow classmates – became an avid admirer of the Spanish Orientalist painter Mariano Fortuny (1838–74), an admiration that only intensified after Repin had the chance to visit his studio in Rome in 1873. In one of his many Parisian letters to his friend and fellow artist, Ivan Kramskoi (1837–87), Repin insisted that Fortuny's paintings were ‘rarities’ and ‘diamonds’ and that all other European art paled in comparison, while ‘with gigantic steps, Fortuny stalks the horizon […] Long live Fortuny!!!’10 It is hardly a coincidence that Repin started work on his first orientally inflected Parisian magnum opus, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876; State Russian Museum, St Petersburg) (plate 2), in autumn of 1873, almost immediately after his visit to Fortuny's studio. Although Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom depicts a scene from Slavic epic, its stylistic, compositional, and formal semantics draw extensively on the Orientalist idiom, as will be demonstrated below. However, before turning our attention to this painting, it is important to discuss briefly two additional Orientalist connections that are typically overlooked in scholarship on Repin's study abroad years in France.The first of these is his sustained engagement with the art and life of Henri Regnault (1843–71), whom Repin considered to be an ‘unparalleled genius’.11 Even before Repin had reached Paris, he wrote to Kramskoi that there is ‘nothing better in painting’ than Regnault's Portrait of General Juan Prim, 8 October, 1868 (1869; Musée d'Orsay, Paris), which he had seen in the French Pavilion at the World Fair in Vienna, while en route to France.12 Once in Paris, Repin made sure he had seen all of Regnault's major paintings, including the latter's Salomé (1870; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Execution Without Trial Under the Moorish Kings (1870; Musée d'Orsay, Paris) (see plate 13). Repin's letters from Paris from 1873 to 1876, as well as his later memoirs, are filled with effusive praise for the French artist, whom he called the ‘pearl of France’ and a ‘giant’ of art.13 Despite his poor command of the French language, Repin nonetheless went to the trouble of acquiring Regnault's collection of published letters about his travels in Spain and North Africa, which Repin claimed he ‘read every night’ with great enthusiasm.14 In addition to Fortuny and Regnault, Repin also repeatedly mentioned a number of other prominent Orientalist artists in his correspondence, including Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Léon Bonnat (1833–1922), and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845–1902), demonstrating his continued interest in the Orientalist genre.

The second Orientalist encounter that had a significant impact on Repin's art, but which is almost always glossed over in accounts of his stay in Europe, occurred during his brief trip to London in May 1875 in the company of Vasilii Polenov (1844–1927), the American artists Frederick Arthur Bridgman (1847–1928) and Charles Sprague Pearce (1851–1914), and the Polish artists, Pantaleon Józef Szyndler (1846–1905) and Wladyslaw Szerner (1836–1915).15 All four of these artists were interested in the Orientalist genre and had produced paintings on exotic themes and subjects. Bridgman was a student of Gérôme and had made several trips to North Africa between 1872 and 1874, dividing his time between Algeria and Egypt. While there he executed approximately 300 sketches, which became the source material for several large oil paintings that attracted immediate public attention and critical acclaim, earning Bridgman the epithet ‘the American Gérôme’. Having studied under Bonnat, Pearce was likewise proficient in the Orientalist genre and had produced multiple Eastern-themed paintings, such as Mourzouk (1876; Private Collection, California) and The Arab Jeweller (1882; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Finally, Szyndler and Szerner also created a number of artworks on the subject of the Orient – a topic that must have surely been at the centre of numerous conversations and debates during the trip, not least because one of its key objectives was to attend the Annual Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, where a number of Eastern-themed paintings had garnered considerable public and critical acclaim.

Among these was Edwin Long's Babylonian Marriage Market (1875; Royal Holloway College, London) (plate 3), which had attracted large crowds and received widespread praise, selling at auction for the highest price ever achieved by any painting in England during the entire nineteenth century.16 Based on a description of Babylonian customs in Herodotus' Histories, the action of the painting is set in ancient Mesopotamia and depicts the auctioning off of eligible females of marrying age to the highest male bidder. Representing different racial and ethnic types, the women are portrayed seated in the immediate foreground of the painting, patiently awaiting their turn on the podium. Their braided hair is fashioned into elaborate hairstyles and they wear resplendent jewellery. Long modelled both the male and female figures after Assyrian reliefs, consciously historicizing the setting and basing the headwear, patterned garments, and wall and floor decorations on ancient Near Eastern sources.