Ilya Repin was a Russian painter, born in 1844 in Chuguev, in present-day Ukraine, who died in 1930 in Finland. He was the great realist of the Russian Empire, famous for Barge Haulers on the Volga, for portraits of Mussorgsky and Tolstoy, and above all for Ivan the Terrible and His Son, the picture of a tsar who has just killed his own heir.
That last painting has been attacked twice. In January 1913 an icon painter walked into the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and cut the canvas three times with a knife. In 2018 a drunk visitor smashed the glass with a metal pole and tore it again.
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The first man to want it gone was the tsar. Repin finished the picture in 1885, four years after revolutionaries killed Alexander II, and Alexander III had it banned from view on 1 April of that year. The order reached Pavel Tretyakov, the collector who had just bought it. Three months later the ban was lifted, and the painting hung in public for almost three decades before the knife.
The two attackers could not have disagreed more. The man in 1913 shouted that there had been enough blood. The man in 2018 said the picture was false, because Ivan the Terrible, in his words, was a saint. One saw too much violence. The other saw a slander against a ruler. The man who made the picture had started out painting saints himself.
What You'll Discover
How an icon apprentice reached the Academy.
Who the men on the rope were.
Why the painting keeps being attacked.
What the Cossacks wrote to the sultan.
Whose faces he fixed forever.
Why he never went home.