Religious Procession in Kursk Province

Repin worked on this for three years, finishing in 1883, and he did not paint a pious crowd. He painted a whole society on the move behind a miracle-working icon, the annual procession from the Korennaya monastery toward Kursk, and he sorted everyone by rank. Out front the well-fed landowners and officials carry the icon in the good clothes. Mounted police shove the poor back to the edges. The one figure who seems to actually believe is off to the side, a hunched boy on a crutch, straining forward toward the icon while a warden raises a stick to wave him off. When the collector Pavel Tretyakov bought the canvas, he asked Repin to swap the plain women near the empty icon-case for a pretty girl glowing with faith. Repin said no and left the crowd exactly as he had seen it.