The story
In January 2003, thieves raided this small museum in Chuhuiv, near Kharkiv, and took Ilya Repin's portrait of Elizaveta Sapozhnikova, painted in the winter of 1880. By the time it came back, about 70 percent of the canvas was badly damaged. It went to Ukraine's national restoration centre in Kyiv and was still being treated when it was shown there in 2013. The sitter was a patron of the arts and the sister of Natalia Polenova, wife of the painter Vasily Polenov.
Repin was born in Chuhuiv in 1844, the son of a military settler. The museum occupies a modest house from the era of the military settlements, where he lived with his family in 1876 and 1877 after his years in Paris. During that stay he painted local people, among them the deacon who sat for his Protodeacon, now in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The museum opened in 1969, for the 125th anniversary of his birth, and besides drawings and etchings it keeps his 1888 portrait of Marianne von Werefkin, his gifted pupil, who later became an Expressionist painter in Germany.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, the exhibition has been closed by decision of the Kharkiv regional defence council, and in January 2026 the collection was reported to be in a safe place. That month both portraits were entered in Ukraine's state register of the national cultural heritage.
