At the Piano. Portrait of Sofia Tarnovskaya

In the summer of 1880 Repin travelled south into Ukraine with his teenage pupil Valentin Serov, hunting for Cossack faces, costumes and weapons for the big picture he was working on, the Zaporozhian Cossacks composing their mocking letter to the Turkish sultan. Part of that summer he spent at Kachanivka, an estate in the Chernihiv region belonging to Vasily Tarnovsky, a collector of Cossack antiquities whose sabres and relics were exactly what Repin had come to study.

This small canvas, less than half a metre high, shows the collector's wife, Sofia Tarnovskaya, at the piano. She is turned in profile, red flowers pinned in her dark hair, her pale dress catching the light against the brown shadows of the room, one hand resting on the keys. The same summer her husband posed for one of the Cossacks in the big painting.