Portrait of writer, dramatist, poetess and translator Tatiana Lvovna Shchepkina-Kupernik

The woman Repin sits down to paint in 1914 is Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupernik, and if you had been to the theatre in Russia in those years, you already knew her work without knowing her face. She was a poet and playwright, but above all a translator. The Russian Cyrano de Bergerac that audiences wept over, first staged in 1898, was hers, and it held the Russian stage for decades afterwards. She came to the theatre by blood too, as the great-granddaughter of Mikhail Shchepkin, the famous actor of the previous century. Repin was 70 here, working at Penaty, his house at Kuokkala outside Petersburg. He finished the portrait in 1914, the year the war broke out.