Beggar (Fisher Girl)

In the spring of 1874 the first Impressionist exhibition opened in Paris, and a young Russian was in the city on a scholarship from the St. Petersburg Academy: Repin, sent abroad to finish his training. That summer he took rooms in Veules-les-Roses, a fishing village on the Normandy coast, and painted the people he found there. This is one of them, a fisherman's daughter who sat for him out in the tall grass. You can feel the new French air in it - the loose meadow, the crimson poppies, the daylight falling straight onto her. What stays Russian is the way Repin looks at her: the tangled hair, the worn clothes, the steady unsmiling gaze he had carried with him from home.