Pan

In the summer of 1899 Vrubel was painting a portrait of his wife, the opera singer Nadezhda Zabela, on the veranda of a country estate. One evening he picked up a book by the French writer Anatole France and read a story about an old satyr. The next morning he scraped his wife's figure off the canvas and began again. What replaced her is Pan, the Greek woodland god, reimagined as a grizzled old Russian faun with pale blue eyes rising out of a marshy twilight field. Vrubel kept the setting from the abandoned portrait, down to the low ochre moon sinking at the horizon. The Tretyakov Gallery acquired it in 1907, a few years before his sight and health gave way.