Museum complex

THE SPRING. THE EASTER SERVICE

Artist Ilya Yefimovich Repin (1844–1930)
Russian Empire
1882
Left, below: IRepin
Canvas, oil paints
85,0 х 114,5 cm
Receipt: purchased from “Magnum Ars” Company, 2000
Open storage (on the right wall from the entrance)

The painting was created under the impression of the murder of Alexander II. “The feelings were overloaded with the horrors of modern time...” — the artist wrote. With the reign of “the peasants’ tsar” Alexander III everyone expected special, good change for the people. Society hoped that, according to I.S.Turgenev, “a share of the most generous mercy shall spill on the peasants”. Repin's painting depicts an epic folk scene in which the artist conveyed “the calm of life and way of things according to their nature”. This confines with the appeal of F.M.Dostoevsky's to peasantry, to the “gray coats” for the real truth: “...We shall learn from the people how to tell the Truth... Let us learn from the people their humility and their efficiency and the reality of their mind and the seriousness of this mind”.

More information...

The theme of the Procession appears in the work of Repin in 1876–1877, when he started preparation for painting of “Procession in the oak forest. The revealed icon” (1876–1924), and made first sketches for the “Procession in Kursk province”. Although “The Spring. The Easter service” was painted during artist's work on the “Procession in the Kursk province” (1881–1883), the canvas of 1882 is associated not only with the above paintings.
Painting “The Spring. The Easter service” is rather a study, which fully embodies the artist’s vision, same as a portrait of the actress Pelageya Strepetova in the role of Elizabeth in the drama of Pisemsky “The Bitter fate”, the most famous sketch of Repin of 1882.
So what has the artist created: a sketch of an unfinished composition; a study based on personal experience of life or purely Repin’s “experience of art”; pictorial metaphor of the “Russian truth”, implementation of which Repin considered a purpose of art?
Definitely this work has an independent meaning among other works of Repin, expressing one of the aspects of social and philosophical problems of his art. We can judge about the mood of the artist in those years, the most significant event of which was the regicide, only by his letters: “The idea to paint a tragic episode in the life of Ivan IV (this refers to the painting “Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on 16 November 1581” of 1885) first came to me in 1882, in Moscow... Modern still healing up, still smoldering craters... it was only natural to search for a way express burning tragedy of history... Feelings were overloaded with the horrors of modern life...” On April 3, 1881 Repin attended in St.Petersburg a public execution of “pervomartovtsy” (participants of murder of Emperor Alexander II on March 1, 1881); since May he lived in Khot’kovo near Moscow, and in July visited the monastery of the Root Nativity of Our Lady in the vicinity of Kursk, where he made sketches for the future “Procession in Kursk Province”.
Time when the picture was created was a time when Russian society awaited changes in connection with the accession to the Throne of Alexander III. Creative intelligentsia suffered moral torments caused by unique historical drama and did not want to remain a simple witness of it. Hopes distant from reality were reflected in famous Tolstoy's letter to the “peasants’ Emperor” begging to forgive murderers of his father's.
The complex structure of the composition, in which a large number of figures of a stopped procession painted from the back, from a left-to-right, has no direct analogies within the Repin’s compositions of the Processions. It is a concentrated example of Repin's use of innovations in artistic system of easel painting. Plein-air color palette; expressive picturesque texture; pulsating around the central figure of the Priest distant from the viewer; complex spatial composition were required to implement a metaphoric idea of the artist.

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