Portrait of the artist's wife, Vera Repin

By 1878 Ilya Repin had come back from three years as a state-funded artist in Paris and Italy and had just joined the Peredvizhniki, the Wanderers, the group of Russian realists who took their exhibitions from city to city. It was also the year he grew close to the circle of artists around the railway magnate Savva Mamontov at his estate of Abramtsevo, near Moscow. Alongside the big public pictures he was known for, Repin kept painting the people nearest to him, and few sat for him more often than his wife. Vera Alekseyevna, born Shevtsova, had married him in 1872, still in her teens, and over these years she appears again and again in his work, at rest, with their children, or simply turned toward the painter.