San Nicola di Mira salva dalla morte tre innocenti

Repin finished this in 1888, at a moment when educated Russia was arguing hard about the death penalty, with Leo Tolstoy among the loudest voices against it. He reached back to a legend about the fourth-century Saint Nicholas of Myra, the bishop who would later soften into Father Christmas, and caught him at the instant he seizes the executioner's raised sword to stop the beheading of three innocent men. The condemned kneel, blindfolded, at the block. A saint halting a state execution was a pointed thing to paint just then. Tsar Alexander III bought the canvas from the travelling exhibition of 1889, and that purchase is remembered as one of the nudges that led him to found a state museum of Russian art.