Iwan der Schreckliche und sein Sohn Iwan am 16. November 1581

Repin worked this up between 1883 and 1885, and he was really painting his own moment as much as the 16th century. In 1881 Tsar Alexander II had been killed by a bomb in Petersburg, and the bloodshed of those years pressed on Repin as he chose this old, terrible subject. The scene is the instant after Ivan the Terrible, in a fit of rage, struck his own son and heir with an iron staff. The father has caught the dying man and clutches him, one hand pressed to the wound, his eyes gone huge with the horror of what he has just done. When it was shown, the authorities were so disturbed that on the tsar's order it became the first painting ever banned in the Russian Empire, the ban lifting only months later. In 1913 a viewer slashed the canvas with a knife and Repin himself helped restore it.