Portrait of G.I. Shoofs 1907

Ilya Repin painted this portrait of G.I. Shoofs in oils on canvas and look at the directness of this guy's stare. You can almost feel him challenging you. I like to imagine Repin circling his subject, building up the form with those loose strokes, the way the background kind of melts into Shoofs' shoulders. It's like he's emerging right out of the ether, a real presence. The black suit swallows him up but the textures really save it. And the white of his collar and cuffs almost feel like these little bursts of light. What was Repin thinking? Was he trying to capture Shoofs' essence, his seriousness, his sort of contained energy? It reminds me a bit of some of Manet’s portraits; how he captured the bourgeoisie, the new type of Parisian man. Painters are always talking to each other across time, riffing on ideas, pushing the medium. They keep each other alive.