The 1880s were the peak of creative career of Ilya Repin, a master of Russian realism. In that period, the painter produced a monumental canvas called Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire.

The image of the courageous, jovial and freedom-loving people delighted Repin, and he began to work on studies right away. He made the first pencil drawing in 1878, but he completed the main variant of the Zaporozhians only in 1891. No other canvas took the painter as long as this one to work it through.

There are two more versions of the Zaporozhians. The first oil draft of 1887 is kept at the State Tretyakov Gallery. In 1889, Repin started to paint another variant of the picture, not so large, but ‘historically more authentic’; however, he never finished it. The painting is now at the Kharkiv Art Museum.

Repin studied the history and lifestyles of the Cossacks very carefully, and he made a special journey to Little Russia. According to recollections of his elder daughter Vera, for a long time the entire family lived with the Zaporozhians: The artist read stories about the Zaporozhian Sich for all family members to hear, the children played at Cossacks and made their figures from clay.

Another source that inspired the painter was Taras Bulba, a romanticized historical novella by Nikolai Gogol. The main characters of the story are present on canvas: The Cossack in a red kaftan, or tunic, and a white sheepskin hat is Taras Bulba himself; the smiling youngster with a yellow and blue lance is Andriy, his younger son; to his right stands Ostap, his elder brother, with a bandaged head.

In 1895, the painting was awarded gold medals at exhibitions in Munich and Budapest. In 1892, Emperor Alexander III bought the Zaporozhians for 35,000 rubles, a huge amount that Repin used to purchase an estate near Vitebsk (now in Belarus). After the 1917 revolution, the picture was transferred to the collection of the Russian Museum.