Portrait of Countess Natalia Petrowna Golovina

The museum this hangs in did not exist when it was painted. Nicholas II signed the order creating a state museum of Russian art in 1895, in memory of his father, and it opened in the Mikhailovsky Palace in Saint Petersburg in March 1898. In 1897, with the collection still being gathered, Repin handed this portrait over to it himself. The sitter is Countess Natalia Petrovna Golovina, wife of Count Golovin, and she later remarried and took the name Goloshchapova. Repin gives her in profile, in a pink gown with an ermine-trimmed wrap, and the fur and the silk are laid in with quick, light strokes. The portrait is still in the palace, in hall 34.