Portrait of the Surgeon Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov

In May 1881 Moscow University marked 50 years of Nikolai Pirogov's work in medicine. He was the surgeon of the siege of Sevastopol, the man who had taken ether anaesthesia onto the battlefield, and delegations came from all over Russia while the city made him an honorary citizen. Repin wanted to paint him and got three sittings, from May 24 to 26, in Pirogov's rooms at the Dresden Hotel. He worked fast, laying the paint on almost in one go, and the date of the first session is still written at the lower left, next to his signature. During those same jubilee days, in the same hotel, a group of doctors examined Pirogov and found a malignant tumour. He died that November, about six months after he sat for this portrait. The following year the Moscow collector Pavel Tretyakov took it into his gallery.