Portrait of Baroness V.I. Ikskul von Hildenbandt

In 1889 the collector Pavel Tretyakov asked Ilya Repin, the leading painter of Russian life, to portray one of the most talked-about women in St Petersburg. Varvara Ikskul von Hildenbandt was a baroness who kept a celebrated salon, where writers, artists and officials mixed, and she poured her energy into publishing cheap, plainly written books meant to bring reading to ordinary Russians. Repin stands her full-length on a tall, narrow canvas, in a vivid red blouse with a high collar and full sleeves above a black skirt, and lets her look straight back at you, entirely in command of the room. She was then in her late thirties. What the picture cannot foresee is what came for her world. After the Revolution, in her seventies, the baroness escaped Bolshevik Russia across the border into Finland, and died in exile in Paris.