Portrait of Yulia Bogdanovna Repman

In 1881 Repin was living in Moscow, and the woman in this portrait had married into a family he had known since his student years in St Petersburg, when he studied at the Academy of Arts alongside her husband's elder brother. Yulia Bogdanovna Repman, born Krauss, was in her early thirties. Her husband, Albert Repman, was a doctor by training who had turned to physics and electrical experiments. As a young man he had tutored the future aviation scientist Nikolai Zhukovsky, then a boy of seven, and from 1889 he ran the applied physics department of Moscow's Polytechnic Museum.

Repin painted Yulia twice, at different times. In this version she sits in a carved armchair with her arms folded over a dark buttoned dress, a white ruffled collar and a brooch at her throat, a small dark cap on her light-brown hair.