In 2024, we are marking the 180^th birth anniversary of Ilya Repin, one of the brightest and renowned Russian artists of the second half of the 19^th century, a key figure of the Russian realistic painting. The creative legacy of Repin is comprised not only of paintings and drawings. At different periods of his career he was also engaged in sculpture.

"The mastery is so high that one cannot trace it!" – Leo Tolstoy once said about one of the paintings by Ilya Repin. This is exactly the kind of craftsmanship that distinguished the artist, whose 180^th birthday is celebrated on the 5^th of August. Ilya Repin and Leo Tolstoy were friends for 30 years. With the exception of the critic Vladimir Stasov, Repin has not portrayed anyone so often. He took Tolstoy as a mythological hero, a deity. There are few comparisons, with which the artist endowed the writer in his memoirs "Far away and close": enchanter, my sylvan, absolute sovereign, holy Prometheus, my demigod. Repin wrote that he was attracted to Tolstoy "by the law of attraction of small bodies to large". And in one of his notes he immortalised the writer: "emissary of the God".

Repin had a strong inclination to make a bust of the writer, and in 1891 Ilya Yefimovich executed a brilliant sculptural portrait. Repin subtly conveyed the peculiarities of the writer’s head configuration, and it was not surprising after the numerous drawings and portraits of the writer that the artist had created. The folds of the shirt are calm, thus allowing the artist to concentrate the entire viewer's attention on the face of Tolstoy.

With his eyebrows slightly knitted, Tolstoy stares attentively ahead, his high forehead and fixed gaze giving us an idea of a writer-thinker. Tolstoy created by Repin is realistic, he is intelligent and perceptive. The artist treated Tolstoy as the most revered Russian writer. Sophia Andreyevna liked the bust very much; she found it the most similar to Leo Tolstoy of all.

Repin's iconography of Leo Tolstoy includes 12 portraits, 25 drawings, 8 sketches of Tolstoy's family members, 17 illustrations of Tolstoy's works and 3 busts. Even in his youth, having entered the Academy of Arts, Repin decided, in addition to drawing, to take up modelling and began to attend a sculpture class. Many artists of the 19^th century turned to sculpture while determining the composition of paintings. Nikolai Ge sculpted his "The Last Supper", Ivan Kramskoi made sculptural sketches, and Repin moulded the figures of the Zaporozhian people in clay for his painting “Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” (they are now in the Repin's workshop-museum).

They were created swiftly and boldly from grey clay with broad strokes. The main thing that interested the artist in this work was conveying the movement. Everything is subordinated to movement, there are no details – they are superfluous. The height of the statuettes is about 25-30 cm.

Often, while working on a pictorial portrait, Repin sculpted a model at the same time. Thus, in 1880, he painted a portrait of Savva Mamontov and made a bust of him. This bust was stored in the Repin's estate Penaty, but was lost during the war. A portrait and one of the most renowned sculptural images by Ilya Efimovich – bust of the surgeon Nikolai Pirogov belongs to the same period. The bust of the eminent doctor testifies to the artist's skill in working with the material and great freedom in modelling the form. Repin sculpted the portrait of his second wife Natalia Nordman in 1902, in St Petersburg. The bust was then cast in bronze and also transported to Penaty.

In general, Repin rarely took up sculpture, although, according to Stasov, "he was an excellent sculptor. Nevertheless, throughout the creative life of Ilya Efimovich we see his interest in sculpture, this related to painting sphere, which attracted him with its ample opportunities of plastic expression of reality.

The section “Sculpture” of the museum collection features a bust of L.N. Tolstoy by Ilya Repin.
Patinated bronze, casting. Height 27 cm
Russia. Model 1891, casting 1890s-1900s.

The portrait bust depicting the great Russian writer is a reduced reproduction of the plaster original (height 62 cm) by I.E. Repin, stored in the collection of the State Russian Museum.
The sculptural portrait of Tolstoy by Repin, executed with true skill and subtle psychological characterisation, is one of the best and almost canonical images of the great writer.

In the late 19^th – early 20^th centuries the bust of Tolstoy was very popular as a cabinet sculpture and was reproduced in different materials.
Biography of I.E. Repin is posted in the section "Authors".