Portrait of V. I. Repina

The girl is Repin's eldest daughter, Vera, who was about 13 when he painted her in 1886. The canvas is tall and narrow, well over a metre high, and she stands full length against a bare, pale wall in a plain dark dress with a thin white collar and cuffs, holding the end of her sash in one hand. Two years earlier he had painted her outdoors in bright sun, perched on a wooden rail, in the picture known as Dragonfly.

The household she grew up in had little time left. In 1887 Repin and his wife, Vera Alekseyevna, separated after 15 years of marriage, and they divided the children. The two elder girls stayed with their father, and the son and the youngest daughter went to live with their mother. Vera herself later spent some years as an actress at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg.