Demonstration on October 17, 1905 (Sketch) 1906

Ilya Repin made this oil on canvas, ‘Demonstration on October 17, 1905 (Sketch)’ sometime around then, and you can see his agitation, right? He’s gone in with these loose gestural marks, a real hurry to capture the intensity of the moment with these darks and pops of red and white. I can just imagine Repin standing there in the thick of it all, trying to get it down, smearing the paint to capture the energy of the crowd, the flags waving, and someone playing the trumpet. Look how roughly the people are painted, their faces just blobs of color, and in the middle, the figure flailing on top of the crowd, hat aloft. I love how he expresses the feeling of a demonstration through texture and color. He might have thought of Delacroix and his painting of the French revolution. There’s such urgency to the sketch, this need to say something, to get it down before it disappears, and you can feel that urgency even now, over a hundred years later. We are lucky to be able to see it.