Ilya Répine

In the early 1870s a young Ilya Repin, born in the small town of Chuguev in what is now Ukraine, spent time watching gangs of men haul barges up the Volga by rope, harnessed like animals. The painting he drew out of it, 'Barge Haulers on the Volga', finished in 1873, shows 11 exhausted men dragging a boat under a huge pale sky, each one an individual portrait rather than a type. It made his name when he was 29.

He became the great painter of the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, a group of Russian realists who broke with the official academy and toured their socially pointed pictures through the provinces. Repin painted revolutionaries, priests, peasants and Cossacks with the same unblinking attention, and his portraits of the composer Mussorgsky and the writer Tolstoy are how those men look in most people's minds.

One picture unsettled even him. 'Ivan the Terrible and His Son', from the mid-1880s, shows the tsar cradling the grown son he has just killed in a fit of rage, blood at the young man's temple and terror in the father's eyes. It was so raw that in 1913 a visitor slashed the canvas three times with a knife, and Repin himself helped repair the damage. He lived until 1930, ending his days at his house near what had become the Finnish border, outside the new Soviet Russia he chose not to return to.