Portrait of N. V. Stasova

Nadezhda Stasova was 62 when Repin painted her in 1884, and she had spent a quarter of a century building the things the Russian state would not provide for women. Sunday schools first, then a publishing co-operative run by women, then cheap lodgings for students, and from 1878 the Bestuzhev Courses in St Petersburg, the nearest thing to a university education a Russian woman could get. Two years after this portrait the ministry of education stopped admissions to those courses. They were allowed to reopen in 1889, smaller. Her brother Vladimir, the critic, had sat for Repin in Dresden the year before. This canvas reached the Russian Museum in 1906, given by her younger brother Dmitry, 11 years after her death.