Illya Repin (August 5, 1844 – September 29, 1930) was a Ukrainian artist and a titan of late 19th-century realism. Born in the city of Chuhuiv in the Kharkiv region, he hailed from a Cossack family with the nickname Ripa. As an adult, he went to study at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts — at the time, the only higher art educational institution in the Russian Empire. Throughout his life, he lived and worked in Ukraine, Russia, and Finland. He was long considered a Russian artist due to the dominance of the Russian/Soviet imperial discourse regarding Eastern Europe. Only now have some museums worldwide, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, begun to restore historical truth by officially designating Illya Repin as a Ukrainian artist. The process of decolonizing Repin's legacy still has a long way to go.
Repin dedicated many of his most evocative paintings to Ukrainian themes, the most famous example of which is the epic "Zaporozhian Cossacks". The pervasive motifs in his Ukrainian canvases are the thirst for freedom and the inner dignity of his subjects. The painting "Ukrainian Girl by a Fence" (1876–1878) is a wonderful example of the artist's deep reverence for Ukrainian culture. The woman, depicted in traditional attire, embodies not only beauty but also inner dignity and strength. By assembling this canvas from puzzle pieces, you will gain aesthetic pleasure and a sense of tranquility, and you will also be able to closely study the elements of Ukrainian women's clothing of the late 19th century.
