Sadko

Repin painted this in 1876 while abroad in France on a scholarship from the Saint Petersburg Academy, and he was a little homesick for Russian subjects. So he reached for an old Russian epic. The merchant and musician Sadko has been drawn down into the underwater kingdom, where the Sea Tsar offers him a bride, and he is told to let three times three hundred sea maidens pass and choose the very last, a plain girl named Chernavushka. Repin sets him at the right, in shadow, watching the glittering procession of half-human sea women drift by. The young painter far from home, sorting real from illusion, was not lost on him. The picture won him membership of the Imperial Academy that same year, and the future Tsar Alexander III bought it. At the very back, small, Chernavushka turns to look at Sadko.