What Freedom! Ilya Repin (1844-1930)

Description of Ilya Repin’s painting "What a vastness!"

As the artist himself admits, the life material for this painting was a fleeting impression. Once, while in the Penatas, on his estate, Repin saw a young couple - a pretty girl and a gymnasium student - being caught unawares by a sea wave.

The girl somehow still tried to defend himself from the elements, while the young man, completely unconcerned with the raging sea, was reading something by heart, proudly and slightly arrogantly opened his chest to the wind. Their mood was completely consistent with the excited sea Endless merriment of these two people, happiness, a sense of youth and eternal love of life Repin chose as the subject for the canvas. Joy and enthusiasm reeks from this painting, as, indeed, from many other works of the artist.

For a long time critics have been reluctant to compare this canvas with the great Ivan the Terrible and the Cossacks. They said the subject was too frivolous and these absurd impressionistic experiments are inappropriate at this age. And when they saw that the student was also a "whitespreader," i.e. a rich man who was totally indifferent to politics, they became furious. Fortunately, not all art connoisseurs held this view.

The most astute realized that it’s not the scene itself that matters, but the feeling it expresses. Recall that the painting was painted in 1903, not long before the First Revolution. Could it be that in the elements the artist intuitively portrayed a premonition of impending unrest? And although, as history has shown, not everything was not so great and cloudless, Repin in the image of a gymnasium student expressed confidence in the people and in life itself.

As for the appeal to Impressionism, in the case of this painting its aesthetics only contributed to the greater realism of Repin’s writing. Accurate, worthy of the marinist Aivazovsky’s rendering of the emerald tide of water, and the detailed reproduction of the young couple’s emotions create an inimitable life-like effect of the scene.