Ilya Repin (1844–1930) was born on 5 August 1844 (24 July in the old calendar) in Chuguev, a small town near Kharkov in what is now Ukraine. His father was a soldier-settler who later sold horses, and as a teenager Repin began painting icons. He then went to St Petersburg to study at the Imperial Academy of Arts, from which he graduated in 1871 with the Academy’s Major Gold Medal.
In 1870 he travelled down the Volga to sketch the barge haulers who dragged boats upstream, and the result, Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870–73), commissioned by Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, made his name. Shown at the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873, it brought him international attention, and it is now in the State Russian Museum. He exhibited with the Peredvizhniki, or Wanderers, from 1874 and became a member in 1878. His other major works include Religious Procession in Kursk Province, Ivan the Terrible and His Son and Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks.
After the Revolution of 1917 Repin remained in Kuokkala in Finland, now Repino in Russia, where he lived at his house and studio, the Penates, and did not accept the new Soviet authorities. He died there on 29 September 1930 and is buried in its grounds.