Jesus' Last Words Of Comfort To The Apostles

by Ilya Repin

Jesus' Last Words Of Comfort To The Apostles
c. 1920
Painting

Details

Ilya Yefimovich Repin (5 August 1844 – 29 September 1930) was a Russian painter who was born in what is now Ukraine. He became one of the most renowned artists in Russia in the 19th century. He is  known for the revealing portraits he made of the leading Russian literary and artistic figures of his time, including Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, Pavel Tretyakov, and especially Leo Tolstoy, with whom he had a long friendship. in the 1920s Repin would create a special and distinctive series of large-scale compositions focused on the New Testament during the last period - one might even say, the concluding stage - of his life, both as an artist and a human being. The visual style and expansive brushwork that characterize this and all the other pieces from the 1920s Gospel series distinguish them from the “classic" Repin of the 1880s. The compositions in question reflect the artist's different emotional state, which called for distinctive means of expression and an appropriate visual idiom: this is a different Repin

About This Artwork

The Bible book of Luke records the final words of Jesus before he died on the cross:

It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last. (Luke 23:44)

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