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# Repin's studio in his house and his Sunday drawing despite doctors' advice
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/iskusstvo-ia-liubliu-bolshe-dobrodeteli-bolshe-chem-liudei-chem-blizkikh-chem-druzei-bolshe-chem-vsiakoe-schaste-i-radosti-zhizni-nashei-iz-pisma-ili-repina-khudozhestvennomu-kritiku-st/
- Published: 2023-06-08T17:02:25.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:01:17.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Art, Museums, People

"...I love art more than virtue, more than people, than my nearest and dearest, than my friends, more than any happiness or joys of our life," from Ilya Repin's letter to the art critic Stasov.

In this studio on the first floor of his house Repin spent the best hours of his life. Everything here was arranged and planned to Repin's own design. It was a spacious, bright room under the roof with two enormous skylights, where several easels stood, at which Repin worked simultaneously. On the walls hung works by his favourite pupils, portraits of friends, sketches. After he gave up his post at the Academy of Arts and vacated the academy studio in 1907, this was the main place where Repin worked. He worked a great deal, almost without pause, until deep old age.

After seventy Repin's health noticeably worsened, and the doctors urged him to work less. To avoid working himself into the ground, at the very least. And, as a minimum, not to draw one day a week, on Sunday.

Chukovsky recalled that on Sundays Repin began to visit him, and that he hid the pencils from him: "He meekly bore this hardship for an hour, and for a second, but it was enough for some 'picturesque' guest to walk into my room, enough for me to light my hanging lamp, which lit those present in a new way, and Repin would look about him mournfully for a pencil or a pen. And finding nothing, he would snatch a cigarette end from the ashtray, dip it in the inkwell and begin drawing on the first scrap of paper that came to hand."

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![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_9103@08-06-2023_20-02-25.jpg)

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