Painting burlacks was a challenge for Repin, who hadn’t yet graduated from the art academy. The subject matter went against all painting canons he was taught to follow, yet he was too fixed on it.

After graduating from the Art School of Kazan in 1900, Fechin went to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg under Ilya Repin, a leading artist of the Russian Realist movement. During ...

Ilya Repin (1844-1930) is a Russian realist painter and an academician of St. Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Arts. He is known as a portraitist and author of historic paintings and works ...