Guy with a bad eye Ilya Repin (1844-1930)

Description of Ilya Repin’s painting "The Man with the Evil Eye".

"The Man with the Evil Eye" refers to the Chuguev period of the author’s work. Everything in Chuguev predisposed Repin to work. The inspiration that was born here gave birth to many truly great canvases of the time.

Repin many called a mystical artist. He worked like a god, forgetting everything during the work. According to witnesses, furiously, sometimes angrily waving his brush, as if he was angry at his sitters.

By a strange coincidence, many people who posed Repin for portraits, sick and even died. Their deaths were often unnatural.

From the brush of the master "suffered" Pisemsky, Tyutchev, Mussorgsky. "Burlaks" - healthy before posing men, after painting the picture also began to die. But, sometimes, the author himself was ill.

A well-known fact: the painting "John the Terrible and His Son Ivan" paralyzed the artist’s hand, and later drove to madness the iconographer Balashov, who in a frenzy cut the picture with a knife. The same mystical power is endowed with the painting "The Man with the Evil Eye," in which Repin depicted a simple peasant - his godfather Ivan Radov, who has notoriety as a local Chuguev witch.

The artist compared the peasant to Zeus, covering his body with a spacious zippun. Only the country clothes distinguish the sitter from the inhabitant of Hellas. Repin so naturally painted details that you can feel even the severity of the look. After painting the portrait, the artist was severely feverish. In many ways this circumstance determined the title of the painting.

The portrait "Man with a Bad Eye" participated in the International Exhibition in 1878. The admiration of connoisseurs had no limits. Especially vividly expressed Kramskoy, who put Repin at the top of all the portraitists, putting beside him, except Vasnetsov.