Note: Ilya Yefimovich Repin (Russian, born Ukraine, 1844-1930) was recognized even during his lifetime as one of the greatest Russian artists of his or any other age. His major works include Barge Haulers on the Volga (1873), Religious Procession in Kursk Province (1880-1883), Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885); and Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880-1891). He was also extremely well-known for the psychologically revealing portraits which he painted of many of the leading political, literary, and artistic figures of his time, including members of the Imperial Family, Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Pavel Tretyakov and especially Leo Tolstoy, with whom he had a long friendship.
In 1898, Repin and his second wife bought a home in the Grand Duchy of Finland a few hours away from St. Petersburg, where Repin began to focus on portraiture. The offered work, apparently previously unknown, was painted during this later period, and is signed and dated from the first year of World War I, into which Russia entered in August of 1914.
The young man in the offered lot is depicted with his head and shoulders reclining on a sofa, his face bound with what appears to be a bandage. Of interest is the fact that the pose echoes that of the famous and now lost work of the same year, the portrait of the legendary singer Feodor Chaliapin and his French bulldog, Bulka. Chaliapin visited Repin in Finland at his house "Penaty" in 1914 and sat for a portrait which depicted the singer reclining on a studio sofa before a gilded easel and several works of art. Repin struggled with both the composition and the painting itself, but still asked famed Russian photographer Karl Bulla to come to the studio to record the event. This was fortuitous, because the photograph is the only surviving image of the largely realized work with the face of the singer fully rendered and the composition artfully sketched out in oil.
The painting was exhibited at the "Wanderers'"exhibition in Moscow in December 1914, and then again in February 1915 in Petrograd, but photos were never taken of the finished work. The image did not meet with critical success, and so Repin began to work and rework the portrait, until, in his own estimation, had ruined the canvas. Repin later wrote after painting K. I. Chukovskiy on 21 January 1926: "My portrait of Chaliapin was beyond redemption. In no way could this unsuccessful portrait satisfy me. I painted and repainted for so long, and from memory rather than from life, and by the end I had completely painted over and destroyed it; only his 'Bulka' (Chaliapin's French bulldog) remained, and so a great deal of hard labour was wasted" (Repin. The Artistic Legacy. M-L, 1949, vol. 2, pp. 284 and 375).
The remains of the great lost work of Chaliapin turned up at auction in June of 2009, when a painting entitled "Portrait of Madame Alisa Rivoir with a Lapdog" signed and dated 1914 was offered as lot 330 at MacDougall's Auction House in London (cf https://macdougallauction.com/en/catalogue/view?id=3197). The work was an important piece of history, as it was revealed to be what was left of the original Chaliapin painting, overpainted by Repin with an image of the nude Madame Rivoir. It was revealed after an x-ray, that beneath the painting's surface, the original image of Chaliapin remained, and that the sofa, background, and image of Bulka had been incorporated into the new work.
It is worth comparing the present lot to the images of the lost Chaliapin work; the young man leans against a divan with the same colors as the divan in Repin's studio seen in the reworked "Rivoir" which formerly depicted Chaliapin. The gilded easel also appears in the background with works of art that certainly recall those that also appear in the background of the Repin studio in the photograph by Bulla. One may also note that while Repin is painting Chaliapin with his arm extended, there is loose sketching which shows that he originally tried to depict him with his right hand at his lapel, exactly as seen in the offered lot. It is conceivable that this expressive and vibrant portrait of a young man was an early effort by the artist to begin to work out the composition and color work in advance of painting of what would become one of his most legendary lost works.
The young man, with a dark bandage across his jaw is enigmatic. Is it perhaps an image of an early war casualty? A family member with a medical issue? In either case, the compelling face renders this portrait study both an important piece of Russian history, and an exceptionally charismatic example of the work of Repin's Finnish period.
