Images of poverty and exclusion are abundant in 19th Century revolutionary French art, one only has to think of Millet or Daumier but I'm not sure if the work of the French was as psychologically charged as that of late 19th Century Russian art. Nicholai Yaroshencko's "Everywhere There Is Life" shows a family of political prisoners about to be freighted off to Siberia throwing crumbs to the birds outside the carriage.
Yaroshenko Everywhere There Is Life 1888
Yaroshenko became influenced by the Russian revolutionary democrats and their journals became his favourite reading material. He fell in with the peredvizhniki (the itinerants - see previous post) and he began exhibiting with them from 1875.
Yaroshenko The Prisoner 1878
In "The Prisoner" Yaroshenko is expressing sympathy for the fighters for freedom and democracy, and by this time he'd been elected to the board of the Society Of The Peredvizhniki. Lenin described Yaroshenko as a marvelous artist and wonderful psychologist of real life.
Yaroshenko The Blind 1879
Ilya Repin is probably best known for his painting "Barge Haulers Of The Volga" a stinging rebuke of the exploitation of labour, but I prefer the painting below called "They Did Not Expect Him". A political exile has returned from the gulags to a surprised family. Critics considered it the finest artistic achievement of a social point of view of the peredvizhniki. (George H Hamilton)
