2-708-769 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'Detail of the Zaporozhets writing a letter to the Turkish Sultan', 1880-1890, (1965). 'Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey', also known as 'Cossacks of Saporog Are Drafting a Manifesto', 19th-century imagining of a supposed historical event of 1676, based on the legend of Cossacks sending an apparently rude and insulting reply to an ultimatum from Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire. 'On the right is Taras Bulba (in a white cap), the hero of Gogol's tale of the same name; on the left is Andrei, Taras Bulba's son; almost in the centre sits Ataman (Chief) Serko with a pipe in his mouth'. Ilya Repin (1844-1930) took nearly 20 years to paint the picture, for which Tsar Alexander III paid him 35,000 rubles, at the time the greatest sum ever paid for a Russian painting. Painting in the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. From "Russian Painting of the 18th and 19th Centuries" by Vladimir Fiala. [Artia, Czechoslovakia, 1965]