Nude Model (from Behind)

In 1894 Ilya Repin took charge of a teaching studio at the reformed Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. One of the changes he pushed through still sounds surprisingly modern. He let his women students work from the nude model, something Russian art schools had almost always kept them away from. This large study of a woman seen from behind, half wrapped in a dark cloth, comes straight out of that studio in the mid-1890s. It reads as a working life-study rather than a finished painting, the kind of thing done to keep hand and eye sharp. Repin was in his early fifties and at the peak of his fame when he set it down. The canvas is close to 1.8 metres tall, so on the wall of the Tretyakov the model stands almost life-size.