Portrait of the Singer Maria Nikolaevna Klimentova

By 1883 Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin was only a few years old and still finding its footing on the professional stage. The young woman Ilya Repin painted here had a particular claim on it. As a conservatory student in Moscow, Maria Klimentova had sung the very first Tatyana in 1879, in the student premiere Tchaikovsky trusted more than any grand theatre. She had studied in his classes, and he praised her. By the time Repin set her down she was a coloratura soprano at the Bolshoi, a few years into an eight-year run there. Repin was at the height of his gift for faces in these years, fresh from a long stay in western Europe. Klimentova would later open a singing school in Moscow and, after the revolution, emigrate; she died in Paris in 1946. Her portrait travelled far from those Bolshoi seasons and today hangs in the National Gallery of Armenia in Yerevan.