page_title: Barge Haulers on the Volga
section_title: Critical opinion, propaganda, and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Barge Haulers on the Volga / Critical opinion, propaganda, and legacy
context_page_description: Barge Haulers on the Volga or Burlaki is an 1870–1873 oil-on-canvas painting by artist Ilya Repin. It depicts 11 men physically dragging a barge on the banks of the Volga River. They are at the point of collapse from exhaustion, oppressed by heavy, hot weather.
  The work is a condemnation of profit from inhumane labor. Although they are presented as stoical and accepting, the men are defeated; only one stands out: in the center of both the row and canvas, a brightly colored youth fights against his leather binds and takes on a heroic pose.
  Repin conceived the painting during his travels through Russia as a young man and depicts actual characters he encountered. It drew international praise for its realistic portrayal of the hardships of working men, and launched his career. Soon after its completion, the painting was purchased by Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich and exhibited widely throughout Europe as a landmark of Russian realist painting. Barge Haulers on the Volga has been described as "perhaps the most famous painting of the Peredvizhniki movement [for]....its unflinching portrayal of backbreaking labor".
context_section_description: Repin considered Barge Haulers to be his first professional painting and it is the work that defined him as a master documentarian of social inequality. When first exhibited, it received enthusiastic reviews for its unsentimental depiction of lower-class laborers, which stood in stark contrast to the romanticised, classical or propagandist nature of most contemporary Russian art. The painting paved the way for Repin to join the Peredvizhniki (the Wanderers or Itinerants), an anti-academic realist movement formed in 1870. The Peredvizhniki sought not only to break away from the academic school, but also to subvert the manner in which art was viewed. By depicting scenes from ordinary life and holding exhibitions in the provinces they aimed to enlighten and make art more accessible to the masses.
  The painting was widely discussed for its break with the traditions of the Academy. It earned Repin the respect of Vladimir Stasov who believed that art shaped people's outlook and the way in which they viewed their own political situation. Stasov encouraged Repin to focus on Russian subject matter and after the release of Barge Haulers, he became a close friend of the artist and enthusiastically praised each of Repin's paintings thereafter. Stasov wrote of the painting, "with a daring that is unprecedented amongst us [Repin] has abandoned all former conceptions of the ideal in art, and has plunged head first into the very heart of the people's life, the people's interests, and the people's oppressive reality... no one in Russia has ever dared take on such a subject".  In return, Repin said that Stasov's "cry all over Russia was the first and the mightiest and it was heard in Russia by everyone capable of hearing. It was thanks to him that my glory spread."
  Fyodor Dostoyevsky read about Repin's painting in the newspapers and assumed it was another Russian work whose artistry was secondary to its social message. He wrote, "Even the subject itself is terrible... I came expecting to see these barge-haulers all lined up in uniforms with the usual labels stuck to their foreheads... To my delight, all my fears turned out to be in vain... Not a single one of them shouts from the painting to the viewer, 'Look how unfortunate I am and how indebted you are to the people!'" To Dostoyevsky, Repin had avoided a common fault of contemporary Russian art, and in doing so had heightened the work's impact. He concluded, "[I saw] barge haulers, real barge haulers, and nothing more... you can't help but think you are indebted, truly indebted, to the people." Such a feeling of an "unpaid debt" owed by the higher society to the peasantry was a common idea of the Narodniks. Today the painting is regarded as seminal in the formation of Russian realism.
  The painting has been criticised both for still bearing hallmarks of academic drawing and for having an overall yellowish tone. Although it won a prize at the Society for the Advancement of the Arts in 1872, Repin continued to rework the canvas until 1873 when it was exhibited at the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg.
  The painting has been widely parodied, and it is often used as the basis for satirical political cartoons in Russia and elsewhere. A Finnish political cartoon by Kari Suomalainen created an international hubbub in 1958 for showing Nikita Khrushchev on a barge pulled by Eastern bloc countries shouting "Imperialists!" to the US and UK on the shore.
  According to the art critic Elia Kabanov, Repin's painting influenced American orientalist painter Frederick Arthur Bridgman to produce his Towing on the Nile in 1875.
caption: Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Towing on the Nile, 1875.
exif: {}