Portrait of E. D. Botkina

In 1881 one of the sights of Moscow was a private gallery in a house on Pokrovka Street. Dmitry Botkin, from a family grown rich on the tea trade, had filled it with more than 100 paintings, most of them French, by Corot, Millet and Courbet, and only ten Russian ones. That year Repin painted Botkin's daughter Elizaveta, eight years before her marriage to the engineer Konstantin Dunker. She sits in a pale blue dress trimmed with lace, white roses pinned at her chest, flowers in her hair and a dark painted fan across her lap. The carved armchair, with an animal's head on its post, and the costly things around her came, the museum in Yekaterinburg notes, from her father's collection.