Illya Ripyn is an outstanding Ukrainian artist and a titan of realism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in the city of Chuhuiv in the Kharkiv region, he descended from a Cossack family nicknamed Ripa. Already as an adult, he went to study at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, which at the time was the only higher art education institution in the Russian Empire. Throughout his life, he lived and worked in Ukraine, Russia, and Finland.

Ripyn dedicated many of his most insightful canvases to Ukrainian themes, the most famous example of which is the epic painting "Zaporozhian Cossacks." The running motifs in his works dedicated to Ukraine are the thirst for freedom and the inner dignity of the characters.

For a long time, he was considered a Russian artist worldwide due to the dominance of Russian and Soviet imperial discourse regarding Eastern Europe. Only now have some of the world's leading museums (such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art) begun to restore historical truth and recognize Ilya Ripyn as a Ukrainian artist. The process of decolonizing Ripyn's heritage still has a long way to go.