Portrait of Vera Veryovkina

Repin painted this in 1916, in the middle of the First World War, at the Penaty, his house at Kuokkala on the Gulf of Finland. The sitter, Vera Verevkina, had been one of his favourite students at the Academy of Arts, and she had just come back from the front, where she had been working as a nurse. The writer Korney Chukovsky, who lived nearby and knew Repin well, remembered her arrival: a tall, beautiful woman with quick movements and a tired face, and Repin meeting her with particular warmth. Years earlier he had admired her talent so much that he showed every visitor to the Penaty a study she had painted of a man from Bukhara. The Russian Museum’s account of the portrait points to its gold-reds, silvery blacks and blacks, and to the proud turn of her figure. Verevkina herself later recalled that he painted it on his birthday, with her sitting in the glazed bay of his studio against a garden that was just beginning to fade.