Ilya Repin (1844-1930) was born into a military family with a peasant origin. During his childhood, a sacristan and deacon taught him literacy and math. In 1855, he attended topographical school but it was closed due to the abolition of military settlements. In 1856, he became a student of Ivan Bunakov, a local icon painter, and made icons and paintings for churches, during this time he also painted portraits of his relatives. In 1863 he moved to St. Petersburg where classes at the Drawing school of the Society for the Encouragement of Artists helped him to pass the exams at the Imperial Academy of Arts, where he studied for about 10 years. During his time at the academy he painted the well-known "Barge Haulers on the Volga" which brought him some fame. Soon after Repin was awarded a large gold medal for his work "The Raising of Jairus's Daughter". He then travelled to Italy and France, where he completed his education in Arts. He came back to Russia in 1876 and joined the Society for Travelling Art exhibitions, becoming one of the leaders of the Russian Realist movement. Repin’s works always focused on social life and this can be seen in his works, such as: "Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom", the revolutionary work “Putting a propagandist under Arrest", the historical painting "Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan", the strong "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks", and psychological portraits "Archdeacon", "Modest Mussorgsky".
The art critic G. Sternin said: "The poetic world of Repin is a phenomenon that has a unique inner entirety... This entirety was organically connected to the common democratic character of Russian art and culture of the second half of the 19th century, with its desire to realize its socio-historical mission through the fundamental problems of human existence". Repin became a member of the St.Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1893. The Penates in Kuokkala, an estate where Repin lived, was no longer a soviet territory after the October Revolution. All attempts by the Soviet government to return Repin to the USSR failed. After Kuokkala became a part of the Soviet Union in 1948, it was renamed Repino in his honor. The Penates also became a memorial museum in 1940.