Ukrainian-born Russian Realist Painter, 1844-1930 was a leading Russian painter and sculptor of the Peredvizhniki artistic school. An important part of his work is dedicated to his native country, Ukraine. His realistic works often expressed great psychological depth and exposed the tensions within the existing social order. Beginning in the late 1920s, detailed works on him were published in the Soviet Union, where a Repin cult developed about a decade later, and where he was held up as a model "progressive" and "realist" to be imitated by "Socialist Realist" artists in the USSR. Repin was born in the town of Chuhuiv near Kharkiv in the heart of the historical region called Sloboda Ukraine. His parents were Russian military settlers. In 1866, after apprenticeship with a local icon painter named Bunakov and preliminary study of portrait painting, he went to Saint Petersburg and was shortly admitted to the Imperial Academy of Arts as a student. From 1873 to 1876 on the Academy's allowance, Repin sojourned in Italy and lived in Paris, where he was exposed to French Impressionist painting, which had a lasting effect upon his use of light and colour. Nevertheless, his style was to remain closer to that of the old European masters, especially Rembrandt, and he never became an impressionist himself.   Related Paintings of Ilya Repin :. | Portrait of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoi | Portrait of Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov, Russian art historian and music critic | Room | Repin-s pencil sketch | Portrait of Leo Tolstoy |
Related Artists:
Bundy Horace
American portraits and landscapes painter, 1814-1883
Peter Isaacz

Jan Van Eyck
1395-1441 Flemish Jan Van Eyck Locations Painter and illuminator, brother of Hubert van Eyck. According to a 16th-century Ghent tradition, represented by van Vaernewijck and Lucas d Heere, Jan trained with his brother Hubert. Pietro Summonte assertion (1524) that he began work as an illuminator is supported by the fine technique and small scale of most of Jan works, by manuscript precedents for certain of his motifs, and by his payment in 1439 for initials in a book (untraced) for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Jan is first documented in The Hague in August 1422 as an established artist with an assistant and the title of Master, working for John III, Count of Holland (John of Bavaria; reg 1419-25), who evidently discovered the artist while he was bishop (1389-1417) of the principality of Liege. Jan became the court official painter and was paid, with a second assistant when the work increased in 1423, continuously, probably until the count death in January 1425.