Portrait of M. P. Musorgsky

In March 1881 the composer Modest Mussorgsky was dying in a Saint Petersburg military hospital, wrecked by years of drinking. His friend Ilya Repin came for four mornings running and painted him right there at the bedside, with no proper easel, the canvas propped on a small table. You can read the illness in the flushed face and unfocused eyes, and in the loose hospital robe with its raspberry trim. Repin finished on the 5th of March. Mussorgsky died before the month was out, at 42, and this became the last portrait from life of the man who wrote the opera Boris Godunov. The collector Pavel Tretyakov bought it at once, and Repin refused the fee, putting it toward a monument for his friend.