I battellieri del Volga

Repin was still a young student when he began this in 1870, and he did the honest thing. He went and lived among the men he wanted to paint, spending time with the burlaki, the barge haulers who dragged loaded boats upstream along the Volga by rope harnesses across their chests. It took him until 1873 to finish. Eleven of them lean into the straps here under a heavy sky, worn down by the heat and the weight, each face a real individual he had studied. Repin picked his group carefully so they stand for a whole cross-section of the poor, including a broken former soldier and, it was said, a former priest. Look for the one figure who breaks the mood. Near the centre, a fair-haired boy called Larka straightens up against his harness, half in revolt, and that flash of colour and defiance is the note of hope in an otherwise grinding scene. When it was shown, the picture landed hard. Some in the establishment were offended that anyone would put such ragged laborers on a grand canvas, while critics who wanted an honest Russian art embraced it, and it made Repin's name almost overnight. He counted it as his first truly professional work.