Russia's Rembrandt

This is a detail from Ilya Repin's large masterpiece 'The  haulers on the Volga', a painting as well known as Holland's 'Nightwatch' by Rembrandt van Rijn.
In a 10 minutes display on tele museum director of the Hermitage in Amsterdam gave a short lecture about this painting and the others that are on display now in the exhibition Perevidnizhki in Assen, where I went to in November last.
She noted the sweat on the head of the hauler (2nd left) and the eyes of the man looking up at the painter and at us all, so to speak, that express his resilience and the blond young man who seems to want to brake free from the ties of ill work thanks to poverty. She also noted that Ilya Repin and his fellow members of the Peredvizhniki, like Vladimir Makovsky and Valentin Serov a.o. painted the ordinary Russian citizens in their daily livelihood and they displayed their poverty and hunger and sorrow. The men here are shown not just as poor tramps in rags and chained to a barge for work and bread, but also as characteristic individuals.
The social-critical paintings of the painters who formed the Peredvizhniki group were controversial at that time and became a weapon in the debates for social reform.

The short lecture on tele I welcomed with surprise and this image I took in November is much more colorful than today's from a dull and dark day... so Russia's Rembrandt it is for today.