Portrait of Tatiana Lvovna Tolstaya, daughter of the writer

Repin spent the New Year holidays of 1893 in Moscow, and by his own account most of those two weeks went by at the Tolstoys'. He had two jobs in the house at once. For a magazine he made a watercolour of Leo Tolstoy at work in his study, because the writer was tired of posing. In oils he painted this portrait of Tatiana, the eldest daughter, on commission from her mother, the Countess. Tatiana was 28, and a painter herself, trained at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Back in Saint Petersburg at the end of January, Repin began a letter to her with "Clever, kind, beautiful Tatiana Lvovna", and a few weeks later he told a friend that he had had a very merry time in Moscow.