“Great Artists” - a collection about outstanding masters of painting. The book series contains more than 50 illustrations, an “exquisitely written” biography of the artist and the history of the creation of the paintings. The album is dedicated to the work of Repin.

Perhaps none of the Russian artists enjoyed such fame during their lifetime as Ilya Efimovich Repin (1844-1930). His contemporaries admired him to the point of illusion for his “living” portraits and multi-figure genre compositions, artistic manner of painting, and socially, his ability to identify the most pressing problems of Russian life. Already his early religious paintings, performed according to academic programs (“Job and His Friends”, “Resurrection” daughters of Jairus") show an amazing gift for subordinating all components of the image - the lessons of the old masters, drawing, color, composition - to the overall dramatic task. The famous “Barge Haulers on the Volga” is also written as an academic order. But Repin creates, on the basis of numerous sketches from nature, painted during a trip along the Volga, a picture that, immediately making the young master a celebrity, creates a sensation. The audience is impressed by both the bright expressiveness of nature - folk types - and the feeling of the formidable force of social protest brewing in these poor outcasts. The entire colorful and compositional structure of the picture expresses not only the greatness of the Volga and its workers, but the very political atmosphere of society, its aspirations and anxieties. Repin's brush with unprecedented energy embodies Man in history, really showing how this history is made, consisting of human feelings and thoughts. As the master himself testifies: “the life around me is too excites, haunts, asks to be put on canvas; reality is too outrageous to embroider patterns with a clear conscience.” However, he remains a brilliant master of form, of these very “patterns,” sensitively perceiving the trends of both impressionism and symbolism. The artist seeks to consolidate the success of “Barge Haulers” in dramatic or spontaneously festive scenes of folk life. The result of these searches was a new masterpiece - “The Procession in the Kursk Province.” “All Rus'” seems to be brought together here in a crowded church procession, but instead of a blissful “conciliarity” we see the mass inertia of the crowd, which, moving along a dry, sun-scorched ravine, among dead clearings, is literally heading to “nowhere”, to some invisible but clearly perceptible dead end. Growing social discord is forcing The artist is increasingly thinking about the theme of revolution. In the films “Refusal of Confession”, “They Didn’t Expect”, “Arrest of the Propagandist” this theme is embodied with unprecedented scale and courage. At the center of the images is a fighter against autocracy, heroically adamant, but at the same time tragically alienated from the human environment around him. Modernizing the motifs of Russian history, the master turns the paintings into powerful clots of feelings and emotions - anger and hatred of the old for the new (“Princess Sophia a year after her imprisonment in the Novodevichy Convent”), violence and fear (“Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan”), crushing, victorious joy (“The Cossacks write a letter to the Turkish Sultan”). An extremely important part of Repin’s heritage are his portraits. He creates wonderful, sharp-character characters compositions (“The Timid Little Peasant”), images of outstanding cultural figures (“N. I. Pirogov”, “M. P. Mussorgsky”, portraits of L. N. Tolstoy) and spectacular multi-figure portraits (“Slavic composers”, “Great meeting State Council" - together with B. M. Kustodiev and I. S. Kulikov). In the master’s picturesque portraits and graphics, the consistent change of stylistic guidelines is especially clearly visible - Wanderer realism, impressionism and modernism.