Military family
Imperial Art Academy (St Petersburg, 1864-76)
1871 – Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (Russian Museum, St Petersburg) wins Major Gold Medal at Imperial Art Academy
1876 – settles in Moscow; frequent guest at Abramtsevo estate of art collector Savva Mamontov
1878 – joins the independent artistic association, The Wanders (Peredvizhniki)
1892 – professor at the reformed Academy
1907 – resigns from the Academy
Paris (1873-76)
Ukrainian Girl by a Fence, 1876 (Belarus Art Museum, Minsk)
Self-Portrait, 1878 (Russian Museum, St Petersburg)
Religious Procession in Kursk Province, 1880-83 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)
Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, 1885 (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow)
Contemporary painter Mikhail Nesterov wrote about the stature of Repin:
"With every year, and with every contemporary art fair staged by the Peredvizhniki, so the name of Ilia Efimovich Repin became dearer and dearer to us artists, and to Russian society. People eagerly awaited his paintings, and he - aware that his great talent obliged him to make every painting, every portrait, not just a personal triumph, but a glorification of his native art - he with matient persistence nurtured every piece...For every picture, every portrait painted by Repin was an event. Decades would pass, and people still remembered not only the very painting and the year of its appearance, but the exact place it occupied at the exhibition."
Mikhail V. Nesterov, Davnie dni. Vstrechi i vospominaniia. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1959, 316. Quoted in Galina Churak, "The Contemporary Reception of Ilia Repin's Solo Exhibition of 1891," From Realism to the Silver Age: New Studies in Russian Culture, Margaret Samu and Rosalind Blakesley, eds. (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014), 211.
Jackson, David. The Russian Vision: the Art of Ilya Repin. Schoten: BAI, 2006
Parker, Fan and Stephen Jan Parker. Russia on Canvas: Ilya Repin. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980
Sarabianov, Dmitri. Russian Art: from Neoclassicism to the Avant Garde, 1800-1917. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1990
Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl. Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990