Vladimir Makovskiy, a very prolific artist dedicated his creative works to a reflection of urban life. His paintings The Date and On the Boulevard are perhaps his two best works. By depicting ordinary life he managed to reflect the deepest tragedies of contemporary society. The poverty of the most vulnerable members of society children and their miserable existence, mothers being doomed to the worst, the estrangement of sons totally exhausted by backbreaking labor were clearly recognizable in these two paintings.The Date is particularly remarkable. When viewing the painting, you can sense the same strain and emotional disconnect that you find in On the Boulevard. At first glance nothing seems askance in either painting. You sense nothing amiss due to the lack of action or covert tension. You see two people sitting on a bench - one of them a young woman with a child, newly arrived from the village to visit her husband. Her husband sitting beside her has become a foreigner to his family and apparently has been so for sometime. The more you look the more you see of a tragedy slowly unfolding before your very eyes. The viewer becomes aware of the contrast between the interplay of the people and the surrounding beauty of an August day on an old Moscow street, oblivious to the tragedy between the husband and wife.

The oldest artist among the itinerants was Vasiliy Perov. His creativity played a special role in the establishment of Russian realism. In his painting Religious Procession on Easter that belongs to his early period, we can find a critical tendency, a typical feature of early realism. He criticizes priests that are to bring the faith to the people but actually do not deserve to be the Lord's pupils. Following a period of creativity, Perov tried to avoid a rude unmasking of people's sins and defects. He starts telling a sad story of contemporary reality. Seeing -off the Deceased is a story in art in which we can see the image of a peasant woman free from idealization. Her fate gains the sympathy and compassion of the viewer. The landscape in an artist's paintings starts playing a specific role in setting the mood of the whole painting. In the 1870s, Perov changed from sad and tragic subjects. He started depicting common people happy with their simple human joy and hobbies. He depicted fishermen, hunters on the holt, and bemused duck hunters.

The creative heritage of Ilya Repin plays a special role in genre painting and in Russian art as a whole. He is considered to be the most talented and famous Russian painter. His interests in painting were pointed mainly to contemporary subjects. He was interested in all aspects of Russian reality, but his talent was more fully revealed in genre and portrait painting. His works can be considered as an encyclopedia of Russian life with its heroes and events. His first famous painting, Barge Haulers on the Volga, painted while he was a student of the Academy of Fine Arts, showed his talent and characteristic manner of work. Unlike the artists who had treated this subject before, Repin was much more interested in the participants of the scene. He wanted the viewers to see their fates and personalities more than the hard labor they were forced to perform. He was the first in the history of art who tried to peer into people's faces to understand who they were. For the first time a common Russian man was depicted as a hero of artistic work. He didn't idealize his heroes but tried to demonstrate their personality. For the first time people could see a group portrait of miserable and humiliated Russian people.

Such an artist's aspiration to concentrate attention on the psychology of the bargemen was always Repin's characteristic feature. Another illustration of this was his painting Religious Procession in Kursk Province. This painting is very typical of Repin and is remarkable for its characteristic details of that time. Being a talented artist he had a wonderfully keen feeling of the main idea that needed to be expressed. One of the features of art of the 1870-80s was the tendency to create big monumental works whereby a person viewing the one life depicted on the canvas could analyze present day reality and see the whole historical epoch of the Russian people. This technique illustrated that genre painting proved to be as powerful and as important as historical painting. Genre paintings illustrated the life of the Russian province, in both events and in human portraits. The action in Religious Procession in Kursk Province takes place in a province famous for its dense forests, but in the picture we can see only stumps left after the trees had been cut down. Modern man's activity resulted in the destruction of nature. We see crowds of people marching along the dusty road.

The composition was arranged in such a way that we almost feel the crowd moving forward, about to crush the spectator. Real religious faith can be read on the faces of heroes depicted on the left of the canvas and especially in the face of the hunchback on the foreground. Note that he is pushed aside by the policeman riding a horse because this poor cripple might disturb rich people proceeding along the road. (Didn't Christ say we are all equal before him?) The painting shows us two extremes: superficial, cold, hypocritical religious feelings on the right half and true believers in God in the left half of the painting. These people are rejected by this insincere society on the left part of the painting. By paying such attention to the individuality of a person, Repin displays the great variety of types and characters of his heroes. In the foreground we see a rich merchant woman avidly holding a icon. She is drawn into arrogance, clearly breaking a main tenet of Christianity. We can spend hours examining the painting whereby the motley crowd is represented as an integral part of the Russian people.

Painting present day reality, Repin managed to reveal a new social phenomena by using new participants. He was an artist forever seeking new subjects, themes, images and means of expression. Many times in his paintings he addressed new social and political moods and, of course, revolutionary events. The policy of terror carried out by several revolutionary organizations entailed cruel murders of some prominent politicians and the assassination of Emperor Alexander II in 1881. This consequently resulted in extremely strict and bloody responses by the Government. As the country became more and more submerged in the blood of innocent victims, the attitude towards revolutionaries gradually changed in the society. Art in this matter absorbed and reflected all topical ideas. Initially revolutionary activity was often compared with the excruciating life and death of the saints of the Gospel who sacrificed their lives for faith. Repin was affected by these ideas, and he painted his Refusal to Confess which glorified fanatical ideas of the day.

Afterwards he conceived the idea of another work They did not expect him, a story about the return of an exiled convict. The interesting thing is that originally Repin planned for a woman to be the main actor in the painting, as women were fighting for these new ideas next to men. Later the artist gave up this idea having considered that it would add some sentimental aspect to the painting. Besides, he realized that the question of the main hero was not so relevant compared to the subject itself. Terrorists were ready to die for the sake of the idea and for the sake of their loved ones. Did these loved ones want such a sacrifice to be made? How did relatives meet these returning anarchists after being separated for decades? Repin's contemporaries usually associated this painting with the parable of the return of the prodigal son. None of the artists expressed an opinion, thus making the viewer decide the destiny of the hero.

Bloody events of reality had not always been reflected directly in genre painting. The background of Repin's Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan was an expression of the artist's feeling of the atmosphere and smell of spilled blood in the room where Ivan the Terrible is holding the head of his son. A son he had just struck in the head with a stave and murdered in a fit of temper. Another painting Nicholas from Mirl, calls for love and forgiveness and shows us how the main hero, Saint Nikolai, intervenes at an execution and saves the lives of people sentenced to death.