Portrait of the neurophysiologist and psychiatrist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev

In the autumn of 1913 Vladimir Bekhterev, the neurologist and psychiatrist in this portrait, went to Kyiv as an expert witness in the Beilis trial. Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jewish clerk at a brickworks, stood accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy, and Bekhterev told the court the killing bore no sign of any ritual. The jury acquitted Beilis. That same year the War Minister retired Bekhterev from the Military Medical Academy, officially for length of service, after 20 years of teaching there. Repin, a friend of long standing who often had him as a guest at his country house, painted him in 1913 in a tunic with shoulder boards, sitting at ease in a bright study with tall glazed windows, all built up in thick, loaded paint. The canvas came to the Russian Museum only in 1956, from the Pavlov Institute of Physiology in Leningrad.