What freedom!

Ilya Repin's 'What Freedom!' (1903) is a late landscape with figure — the woman standing in the wind on the sea coast, her arms spread and her body turned to face the full force of the sea wind, expressing a physical joy in elemental freedom. Repin's engagement with the freedom theme at this late stage in his career carried political as well as physical resonance — the woman's abandonment to the elemental force of the sea wind as an image of liberation within the context of Russia's pre-revolutionary political tensions.

Repin renders the wind-blown figure with the physical energy and atmospheric immediacy that characterized his best plein air work — the woman's figure against the marine horizon, her drapery and hair streaming in the wind, the quality of the overcast or clearing coastal sky creating the atmospheric context for the figure's elemental response. His handling of the figure's specific physical experience of the wind gives the image its sense of physical liberation and natural vitality.