Portrait of a Neapolitan woman

In December 1893 Repin took his son Yuri to Naples and stayed through the spring, partly so the boy could work on his languages. He wrote that he had come to relax and look around with no ulterior motive at all, then painted steadily anyway. The woman here was the one giving him his own Italian lessons. He sat her at her desk with a book, in the same room where he had painted Yuri holding a Baedeker guide against the light off the Bay of Naples, and he signed the canvas in Cyrillic at the top left with the word Naples and the date 1894. Behind her there is nothing but flat terracotta brown. The picture travelled to Stockholm in 1919 for an exhibition of Russian art and is now in private hands.