Ilya Repin's painting Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 shows Ivan IV, the Russian tsar known as Ivan the Terrible, on his knees in a palace room. In his arms lies his eldest son, Ivan, heir to the throne, whom he has just struck a fatal blow in a fit of rage.
Repin completed the picture in 1885, and it became famous almost at once. A few weeks after its first showing, Emperor Alexander III had it removed from view. Visitors have attacked it twice since, with a knife in 1913 and with a metal post in 2018, and in Russia people still argue over whether the murder ever took place.
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What does the Ivan the Terrible painting show?
On a rumpled carpet, an old man in a black robe holds a young man who has slid to the floor, and the hand pressed to the young man's head is the one that struck him…
What You'll Discover
Why Repin took the staff out of the tsar's hand
What a Jesuit envoy heard about that night
Which young writer lent the dying prince his face
Why the emperor ordered the canvas out of sight
What a museum buffet had to do with 2018
When the public finally saw it again