Just remembered this painting for some reason. Ilya Repin (1844-1930) was a Ukrainian artist that I knew as the artist who painted revelatory portraits of typical non-aristocratic Russians. Most people know his famous paintings of the toiling barge haulers on the Volga and Zaporozhian Cossacks. But this painting is different. I stumbled on it while flipping through a large folio of his collected artworks in grad school. It's apparently based on the old Russian Fairy Tale about Sadko's journey to the Tsar of the Sea.
There is something both old and new here. Repin lived a long time, straddling two centuries and a variety of schools of art. There is a debt to traditional realist art, but there is also something very surreal,dreamy and even fluorescent. Such a great attention to detail. The style is similar to patterns found on Palekh laquered boxes. But I still remember how amazed I was when I came across this painting. Repin is often maligned because the Soviet Communist party found in his art a sympathy for the common laborer and whose works revealed the indignities suffered by peasants under a Tsarist government. I just happen to like some of his paintings because they are great art.
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