Portrait of patroness and countess Mara Konstantinovna Oliv

By 1906 Ilya Repin was in his early sixties and had settled at the Penaty, his house at Kuokkala on the Gulf of Finland, just outside the capital. That year Mara Oliv came to sit for him. Born in 1870, she moved in the world of Savva Mamontov, the railway magnate and art patron. As a grand-niece of his, she had taken part in the amateur theatricals of the Abramtsevo circle, the artists' colony he ran near Moscow. Repin admitted he was rather taken with his sitter, and the warmth shows. He gives her a light blouse scattered with red poppies, the one strong note of colour in the picture. The portrait belongs to his late manner, looser and quicker than the sharp realism that had made his name a generation earlier.