Barge Haulers on the Volga

Realism Abroad

Ilya Repin

Barge Haulers on the Volga

1870–73

Oil on canvas, 131.5 × 281 cm. State Russian Museum, St Petersburg

Eleven men in harness drag a barge along the riverbank under a hot sky.

  • Repin first saw haulers on the Neva in 1868 and made two trips to the Volga to study them.
  • Unlike Courbet's faceless stonebreakers, each hauler is based on a portrait of a real man.
  • Shown at the Vienna World's Fair in 1873; the Russian Museum says it opened a new era in genre painting.
  • Labor shown as a long, grinding line of exhaustion across the whole width of the canvas.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

48 / 59