Portrait of an Italian woman

Repin painted this in 1870, when he was 26 and still a student at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. Fame was a few years off. The picture that would make his name, the great line of exhausted men hauling a barge up the Volga, was not finished until 1873, and his own travels to Italy and France came later still. So this Italian woman was almost certainly painted from a model in Russia, before Repin had set foot in Italy. He gives her a plain dark ground and a steady, level gaze. The canvas now hangs a long way east, in the regional museum at Irkutsk in Siberia.