Pavel Tretjakov

By the early 1880s Pavel Tretyakov had been buying Russian pictures for 25 years and was ordering portraits of the country's writers, composers and scientists so that their faces would survive. His own he did not want. This one was Repin's idea and nobody's commission. Tretyakov sat for it on Sundays in the artist's studio, in the dark frock coat Repin asked him to wear, and it was finished in 1883. The family were unhappy with the result. His wife Vera called the pose an awkward turn, his daughter saw weariness in the whole figure, and Tretyakov had the picture pulled from an exhibition in 1884. Three years after his death Repin painted him again, this time standing among his own paintings, working from a photograph and a death mask. Both portraits belong to the gallery he handed over to the city of Moscow in 1892.