Eleven men harnessed in leather straps drag a barge along the sandy bank of the Volga under a hot, hazy sky. Repin sketched real haulers in 1870 and chose them as a cross-section of Russia, including a former soldier, a defrocked priest and a painter. The finished picture made his name and became the best-known image of the Peredvizhniki's social realism.
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In the centre, a youth in a pink shirt strains against his strap. Far off on the river, a tiny steamboat hints that this labour is becoming obsolete.
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