Portrait d'E. N. Zvantseva

Elizaveta Zvantseva came into Repin's studio as a pupil in the late 1880s. He painted her in 1889, a year when he was in love with her and writing to tell her so. She turned him down and went on working. Later she opened her own art school in St Petersburg, with Leon Bakst and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky teaching in it, and the young Marc Chagall spent a stretch there as a student. The canvas is 89 by 69 centimetres, handled loosely enough that the brushwork reads as pattern in places rather than description. It hangs in Helsinki because Repin gave it to the Ateneum himself, in 1920.