Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan

The story of Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan

An old man in black kneels on a red carpet clutching a younger man to his chest, one hand pressed to the wound in his son's temple, his own eyes huge with horror. The staff he did it with lies on the floor. Repin painted it in 1885, taking the story of Tsar Ivan IV striking his heir in a rage in 1581, and it has been in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow ever since, though not always on view: a visitor slashed it with a knife in 1913 and another attacked it with a metal pole in 2018. It is the most upsetting painting in Russian art and also, technically, one of the most beautiful.

On a wall, this is a dark, deliberately uncomfortable image with one dominant color. The palette is black and deep brown with the carpet's crimson filling the lower half, the son's pale green robe, and the two faces lit as if by a single candle. It suits a study, a library, a den, or a hallway in a home that likes its art serious, and it fits dark, academic, and old-world interiors. We offer it in the Mini at 10.3 × 8 in and the Petite at 14.1 × 11 in. The Petite is the size to hang alone at eye level; the Mini belongs in a wall of history paintings.

Repin's Barge Haulers on the Volga is his other great picture of suffering, on a larger scale. Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son is the same subject as a nightmare, and Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes is the other famous painting of the moment right after violence. More from Ilya Repin.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Tretyakov canvas, with the reds and blacks held to the original rather than softened.