Portrait of N. I. Repina

By 1895 Ilya Repin, the painter of exhausted barge haulers and cornered revolutionaries, had turned country squire. Three years earlier he had bought Zdravnevo, an estate on the Western Dvina near Vitebsk, and he spent his summers there farming, building, and painting the people closest to him. This is his daughter Nadezhda. He dressed her for the part of a country huntress and described her himself as standing in hunting clothes, a gun over her shoulder and a heroic look on her face. The man who had spent decades recording other people's hardship was now free to paint for pleasure, on his own land, someone he loved. The estate that shaped these calmer summer portraits lies today just across the border in Belarus, where Zdravnevo is kept as a Repin house-museum.