Seeing off the Recruit

Repin painted this in 1879, only a few years after Russia overhauled its army. Until 1874, being taken for a soldier meant a term so long, once 25 years, that a village saw a conscript off almost as if burying him; the reform of that year cut the service sharply and made it fall, by lottery, on young men of every class. Repin sets the parting inside a dim peasant hut at the moment of leaving: the young recruit surrounded by his family, an old woman collapsed against him, a cart waiting outside. He was among the painters who insisted such ordinary Russian lives belonged in serious art. He showed the picture abroad too, at an international exhibition in Berlin in 1891.