Portrait of Lyudmila Shestakova

The woman in this portrait is Lyudmila Shestakova, and in 1899 she was 83. Her brother was Mikhail Glinka, the composer of A Life for the Tsar, who died in 1857. She spent the half century after that getting his scores published and his manuscripts kept together, and from 1866 her drawing room in Saint Petersburg was where the young composers around Mily Balakirev gathered, the circle later known as the Mighty Handful. Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin all worked in that room. Repin had painted Glinka himself in 1887, 30 years after the composer's death and entirely from other people's recollections and old images. When he came to paint her, she was among the last people alive who had actually known him. She died seven years later, at 89.