Ceremonial Sitting of the State Council
Ilya Repin (1844 to 1930) · 1903
Eighty one men in red and gold uniforms sit in a great round hall beneath columns, medals glinting, papers on their knees. This is the highest advisory body of the Russian Empire at the moment of its hundredth anniversary in nineteen hundred and one, with Tsar Nicholas the Second at the centre table. The canvas is nearly nine metres wide and curves slightly with the room it depicts, so that walking past it you feel you are moving around the actual chamber.
Repin was almost sixty and his right hand was failing, so he painted with his left and took on two assistants, Boris Kustodiev and Ivan Kulikov. Even so, the picture is a triumph of speed and looseness: the uniforms are slabs of scarlet laid on with a wide brush, the faces are done in a few strokes each, and the light from the high windows dissolves the far end of the hall. The individual portrait studies for the picture, some of which hang nearby, are even freer and are among the finest Russian oil sketches of the period.
The painting was commissioned by the government and finished in nineteen hundred and three. Within a few years many of the men shown would be swept away by revolution, and the State Council itself would vanish in nineteen seventeen. That gives the picture an afterlife its patrons never intended: it is the last group portrait of the old regime, painted with an honesty that spares no one. Look for the notorious Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod, a pale, hollow face near the centre that Repin painted with something like fascination.
Did You Know? Because of his failing hand Repin painted much of the enormous canvas with a palette strapped to his waist so he could work with his left.
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