This article explores the development of a singular painting by Russia’s most famous realist painter, Il’ia Repin. First exhibited under the title Un café du boulevard, the work was conceived during Repin’s stay in Paris from 1873-75. Repin himself described the work as “the main types of Paris in their most typical place,” but what he produced proves a departure for the young artist not only in terms of its Parisian subject matter. Careful analysis of Repin’s letters and the work itself show him searching for a stylistic language that had universal translatability in this moment, one that he importantly associated with the French artist Édouard Manet. Understanding how Repin came to center his painting on cocottes and flâneurs, the foremost heroes of western European urbanity, allows for a new understanding of transnational connections in late nineteenth-century art, one in which Russian artists mediated French modernism as it was developing.
