The Wanderers Russian Art Movement

Formed in 1863, among members of the St Petersburg Academy of Art, including Kramskoy and Repin, the Wanderers was an association of progressive Russian painters, who predated Impressionism by a decade and who - chiefly concerned with rural landscape painting - toured the countryside painting what they saw in an effort to promote awareness of rural life outside the cities. Their focus was to portray the strengths and hardships of the country in an affectionate, nationalistic manner. Members of the Wanderer Movement produced a wide range of landscapes, portraits and genre paintings, which they then sent on exhibitions around Russia.

Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son.
Not a landscape(!) but it's Ilya Repin's
most famous painting.

Tretyakov Collection

The Wanderers received a variety of support from other Russian artists, as well as the art critic Vladimir Stasov, who promoted their painting and artistic program. The art-collector Pavel Tretyakov bought many of their best works, which later formed the basis of the Tretyakov art gallery which opened in Moscow, in 1892. The cultural work of the Wanderers was used by Lenin and other Bolshevik agitators to stimulate support for their radical ideas. However, once in power, Lenin replaced the Wanderer Group with a new Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AARR), which became popular with traditional painters rebelling against the European Cubist and Surrealist-inspired abstract movements of the early twentieth century.

Eventually, the Wanderers/AARR formed the basis for the Russian Socialist-Realist art movements of the 1930s, which dominated Soviet visual arts for decades.

Bargemen on the Volga. Ilya Repin's
second most famous painting.

Ilya Repin

The most famous member of the Wanderers was Ilya Repin (1844-1930), whose works encompassed landscapes (eg. River Bank; Autumn Bouquet), portraits (eg. Mahmoud IV of Turkey), dramatic history painting (eg. Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan), and rural scenes (eg. Bargemen on the Volga). Figure painting remained his focus, and even his landscapes are populated with people.

For the differing styles of landscape art in Ireland, see Irish Landscape Artists.

• For more about the different types of painting (portraits, landscapes, still-lifes etc) see: Painting Genres.
• For details of landscape and portraiture in Ireland, see: Irish Art Guide

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