Porträt der Jelisaweta Wassiljewna Saposchnikowa

Repin painted this portrait in 1880, a Moscow year of commissions from well-off families, while he was filling sketchbooks for the Cossack picture that would keep him busy for another decade. The canvas stayed with the sitter's descendants for two generations. In 1936 the family gave it to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and three decades after that the Tretyakov passed it on to a newly founded museum in Chuguev, the small garrison town in what is now the Kharkiv region of Ukraine where Repin had been born in 1844. That museum occupies the house his parents lived in.