Portrait of Varya Adoratskaya

Fechin painted this in the spring of 1914, in the Kazan studio of one of his own students, and the sitter is a girl of about ten named Varya. She sits on a table among a scatter of toys and sweets, the paint around her loose and thick, worked almost like relief with a knife. When it was first shown, viewers set it beside Serov's Girl with Peaches, the same warm hush, a child caught between stillness and fidgeting. What no one in that room could know was how little of that calm remained. Within a year Russia was at war, and nine years after this Fechin left the country for good and never again painted it from life.