The present lot was painted by Repin while he was working on a late version of The Black Sea Pirates (1908-1919) and served as a model for the Cossack with the bandaged head in this painting (fig.1). He is easily recognisable in the foreground among the free-wheeling Zaporozhians, who have run into a storm in the Black Sea while sailing back in their speedy Chaika from a successful raid. Research has shown that Repin began work on this painting in the second half of the 1890s. In 1908 he showed it at the 37th Itinerant Art Exhibition but unsatisfied with the result, he returned to his studio and continued working on it for a further ten years. With considerable reworkings, the work was finally completed in 1919 and sold to a Swedish collects or.
The significance of The Black Sea Pirates is as a representation of a new phase in Repin’s development where his overriding interest is in discovering a new pictorial language, in resolving the issues of colour composition and harmony of palette.
Scenes from the lives of the Zaporozhian Cossacks were among Repin’s favourite subjects. (The Zaporozhian Cossacks were an amalgamation of freed men organised in military units. Their camp stood beyond the bounds of the Dnieper.) He dedicated a number of significant works to them, including three large-scale paintings: The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880-1891), State Russian Museum; The Black Sea Pirates (1908-1919), private collects ion; and The Hopak, Dance of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1926-1930), private collects ion, Moscow.
The first of these has become known the world over. In the artist’s own lifet.mes it was exhibited not only in Russian but in Germany, America and Hungary. The other two however were until recently practically unknown outside academic circles as they belong to the artist’s Finnish period and were sold to foreign private collects ors.
When he worked on paintings depicting scenes from the past, Repin would carefully study and collects historical material. Despite the fact that he was born and raised in Little Russia, while working on The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan he twice travelled to Ukraine and even visited the place where the Zaporozhian camp stood. While on his travels he collects ed unique archaeological and ethnographical artefacts and made a huge number of sketches and studies in both pencil and oil. First and foremost these were depictions of the Zaporozhians’ descendants who shared the characteristic features of the heroes of the past. Repin made use of this material in his paintings on the life of the Zaporozhians.
The artist took the subject of the Black Sea Pirates from Ukrainian folklore. On showing the work to the actor Grigory Grigorievich Ge (nephew of the artist Nikolai Ge) Repin quoted excerpts from the popular legend The Storm on the Black Sea, the epic poem about Alyosha Popovich, to explain it. According to Repin, he chose the moment in which his heroes ‘find themselves in a state of complete ecstasy, repenting their sins and ready to face sudden death in the stormy waves of the Black Sea, already in clean tunics – those who are able are forming their last prayers’ (letter from Repin to G.S. Petrov dated 31 October 1910).
Having asserted their independence on land and at sea, the Zaporozhian Cossacks waged naval campaigns against whole fleets as far as the Turkish shores. For Repin, the Cossack settlement was an example of a sui generis republic: ‘A free fellowship of free people, the like of which is unknown. The swashbuckling forces of the Russian people recanted earthly blessings and founded an egalitarian fraternity for the defence of the best of their principles of the Orthodox faith and personal freedom. Nowhere on earth were liberty, equality, fraternity so keenly felt! For their whole lives the Zaporozhians remained free, subject to nobody,’ wrote Repin in a letter to N.S.Leskov in 1880 when work on The Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan was in full swing (I.Repin, Izbrannye pis’ma. Vol.1, Moscow, 1969, p.359).
The artist praised the freedom-loving Cossacks, he esteemed the Zaporozhian qualities of courage, resilience in the face of ordeal, and simultaneously remarked upon their innate piety and capacity for contrition. ‘Many of them ended up taking holy orders after all of their barbarian exploits’ (I.Repin, Izbrannye pis’ma. Vol.2, Moscow, 1969, p.231).
The present portrait of a Cossack is one of the most important and best loved studies Repin made for the painting. This striking Zaporozhian type is a warrior. In the symphony of different emotional states and human behaviours in the face of death that Repin portrayed in The Black Sea Pirates, it is the figure of the Cossack with the bandaged head who symbolises valour and steadfastness. He looks out at the viewer with an expression of pride and strength. There is evidence that in 1909, Repin painted another study for the painting called Zaporozhian Type, Conqueror (present location unknown) which would certainly be a fitting title for this portrait.
In stylistic terms, with the broad expressive brushwork and arrangement of colours, this work is similar to Repin’s portraits from the 1910s – Kornei Chukovsky (1910), Dmitri Kardovsky (1910) and Vladimir Bekhterev (1913) among others.
The present lot is one the most successful in Repin’s oeuvre. A work of great inspiration which rouses a variety of aesthetic and emotional responses in the viewer.
We are grateful to Tatiana Borodina, Director of the Penaty Estate Museum of Ilya Repin for providing this catalogue note.