In der Sonne

Twelve years earlier Valentin Serov had painted a young woman sitting in broken summer light and called it Girl Lit by Sunlight, and Russian painters had been chasing open daylight ever since. Repin gave his answer in 1900, and the model was his daughter Nadezhda, who was 26. He took the shape of Serov's title as well and called the picture simply In the Sun. It was painted at Zdravnyovo, the estate near Vitebsk he had bought in 1892 and where the family spent its summers. Everything in it is arranged around one problem, which is how to keep a face readable in unshaded daylight. Behind her head sits a pale straw panama, and behind the panama an open black umbrella, so the lit face has something lighter to sit against and the hat has something darker.