Working with Kramskoi, in a year Repin developed his skills sufficiently to be accepted in the Academy. In 1870, Repin made his first scketches for Baurge Haulers on the Volga, while being on a boat trip. When the work was finished in 1873, it immediately won recognition. For his diploma work, Raising of Jauris' Daughter (1871), Repin was awared the Major Gold Medal and received a scholarship for studies abroad.

In 1873 Repin went abroad. For several months he had been traveling around Italy and then settled to work in Paris up until 1876. It was in Paris that he witnessed the first exhibition of the Impressionists, but, judging by the works created then and his letters home, he didn't become an ardent follower of a new Paris school of painting, though he didn't share the opinion of some of his countrymen who saw in the Impressionism a dangerous departure from "the truth of life."

After returning to Russia, Repin settled in Moscow. He was a frequent visitor in Abramtsevo - the country estate of Savva Mamontov, on of the famous Russian patrons of art. It was a very fruitful period of his creative activity. During these 10-12 years Repin created majority of his famous paintings. In 1877, he started painting a religious procession (Krestniy Khod), Krestniy Khod in Kursk Gubernia (1880-1883). The composition was based on the dramatic effect of different attitude of the participants of the procession to the wonder-working icon carried at the head of the procession. There were two different versions of the picture. The second one, completed in 1883, became the most popular. At first glance the spectator discovers in the crowd the abundance of social types and human characters.

A series of paintings devoted to the revolution theme deserves special attention. The artist was no doubt interested in creating the character of a fighter for social justice. The range of social, spiritual, and psychological problems, which attracted Repin, is revealed in his works: Unexpected Return (1884) and Refusal from the Confession (1879-1885).

Repin is the author of many portraits, which are an essential part of his artistic heritage. Repin never painted faces, he painted real people, managing to show his models in their natural state, to reveal their way of communicating with the world: Portrait of the Composer Modest Musorgsky (1881), Portrait of the Surgeon Nikolay Pirogov (1881), Portrait of Author Alexey Pisemsky (1880), Portrait of Poet Afanasy Fet (1882), Portrait of the Art Critic Vladimir Stasov (1883), and Portrait of Leo Tolstoy (1887) and many others are distinguished by the power of visual characteristic and the economy and sharpness of execution.

Repin rarely painted historical paintings. The most popular in this genre is Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan (1895). The expressive, intense composition and psychological insight in rendering the characters produced and unforgettable impression on the spectators. Another popular painting in this genre is The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV (1880-1891). The faithfully rendered spirit of the Zaporozhian freemen, who, according to the artist, had a particularly strong sense of "liberty, equality and fraternity"undoubtedly gives the picture its significance. The contemporaries saw it as a symbol of the Russian people throwing off their chains.

For six years Repin lived in Moscow (1876-1882). Then he moved to St. Petersburg. He also made several trips to Europe - in 1883, 1889, 1894, and 1900. He taught at St. Petersburg's Academy (1894-1907) and was an influential member of the Wanderers. In 1900, during his trip to Paris, Repin met Natalia Nordman, "the love of his life" (Repin was separated from his wife), and moved to her home Penaty (Penates), in Kuokkala (Finland), located about an hour train ride from St. Petersburg. Together they organized the famous Wednesdays at the Penaty which attracted the creative elite of Russia. When Nordman died in 1914, she left the estate to the Academy, but Repin occupied it for the next sixteen years.

Handicapped by the atrophy of his right hand, Repin could not produce works of the same quality as those which brought him fame. Although he trained himself to paint with his left hand, he lived his last years under a constant financial strain. Since artist did not accept the Revolution of 1917, he did not want to go back to Russia, even though in 1926 a delegation sent by the Ministry of Education of the Soviet Union helped him financialy and tried to entice him to return.

To acknowledge and commemorate Repin's artistic achievement, in 1948 Kuokkala was renamed Repino. Penates in Finland became a museum of Repin after he died in 1930. The museum visitors have the opportunity of gaining a detailed knowledge of the artist's life and work.

As Fan and Stephen Jan Parker note in their monograph on Repin, "Western art historians and critics have minimized Repin's achievements and contributions either because his very "national" identity has not been grasped, or because - and this is most likely - Repin was neither a technical innovator nor the creator of a school of painting. Moreover, he was a realist and not a modernist. Yet in the esteem of both prerevolutionary and Soviet Russia, Repin occupies a position alongside Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Musorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. He was and is Russia's foremost national artist, whose oeuvre adheres to the requisities for national art as proposed by the noted painter and art historian Igor Grabar: it must reflect the spirit of the people, expressing their thoughts and aspirations; it must excite; and it must be understandable to the people" (Parker, 1).

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