A Soviet Fedoskino lacquer box, painted by Antony V.D. after Repin, 1965

Acquired by the grandfather of the present owner in the early 20th century

Repin’s Zaporozhian Cossacks documents the moment when, as legend has it, in 1676, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire Mehmed IV (1648-1687) demanded that the Cossacks comply with Ottoman rule. Defiantly, the Cossacks and their leader Ivan Sirko delivered a letter to the Sultan which was filled with profanities and vulgarities. Repin’s scene depicts the Cossacks reveling in the writing of the letter and challenging one another to come up with even more obscene insults. Though the original letter has never been found, in 1870 an ethnographer named Novitsky discovered a supposed 18^th-century copy of the letter in Dnipró.

19^th-century art and literature often featured the Zaporozhian Cossacks, shining the spotlight on their notorious rejection of authority and vitality which was laid out in stark opposition to the submission of city-dwellers to the Russian state. Decades before Repin’s rendition of the tale, Nikolai Gogol also made reference to the event in his novella Taras Bulba (1842) which follows the life of the eponymous protagonist (who was himself a Zaporozhian Cossack) and his two sons on their quest to join the Zaporozhian Sich and the war against Poland.