Portrait of Bella Gorskaya

Repin was 66 in 1910 and had long since left Petersburg for Penaty, his house at Kuokkala on the Gulf of Finland, where he kept open house on Wednesdays and painted his visitors quickly. The actress Bella Gorskaya sat for him out of doors. The picture is put together in broad open strokes with the daylight doing the modelling, and it looks very little like the dark studio portraits that had made his name in the 1880s. She wears an open-necked dress, and her hair is built up over a pad in the way it was worn that year, so that a hat could be pinned on top of it. Those hats went on getting bigger for most of the decade that followed.