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The lead man is Kanin, a defrocked priest Repin knew by name and painted from life. He called the head worth a Greek philosopher.

Ilya Repin was 24 and still at the Academy when he saw them on the Neva: a gang of men in harness dragging a barge upstream, passing a bank of students and summer people with parasols. The contrast lodged. In 1870 he took his brother and the landscape painter Fyodor Vasilyev down the Volga and spent two summers at Shiryaev Buerak living near the burlak gangs, sketching them, learning names, paying for portraits with tobacco. That is the fact that makes the painting what it is. He did not paint a mass. He painted eleven specific men, and you can tell them apart from the far side of a gallery. The leader in the front rank was a defrocked priest named Kanin, whose head Repin described with open reverence, a philosopher's forehead over a strap and a shirt that had stopped being a shirt. Behind him the gang sorts itself by exhaustion: one man packing a pipe as he walks, one sagging almost to his knees, one at the back barely upright and being carried by the rope as much as pulling it. And in the middle, catching the light in a pink rag of a shirt, is the boy. Larka, seventeen, straightening up mid-step to shift his harness, the only figure in the line who is not accepting the arrangement, painted at the exact center of a canvas about acceptance. When it was exhibited in 1873 the establishment was embarrassed and said so in the language of policy: a minister of transport complained that the picture advertised a practice already being replaced by steam tugs, which was true, and which Repin had already put in the painting, a steamer smoking on the horizon behind them, coming up the river to make all 11 men redundant. Dostoevsky, who had feared the artist would preach, wrote with relief that Repin had not; the haulers simply are there, and the viewer does the accusing. The Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich bought it for 3,000 rubles and hung it in his billiard room, where he cheerfully explained it to guests. It went to the Vienna World's Fair the same year and came home a European reputation. Repin lived another 57 years, painted Ivan the Terrible and the October Manifesto and most of Russia's other permanent images, and never again needed anyone's permission. The barge is off the right edge, unpainted. He only ever showed the rope.