ヴァレンティン・セローフ

In the summer of 1887 Valentin Serov was 22 and staying at Abramtsevo, the country estate outside Moscow where the railway magnate Savva Mamontov gathered painters, singers and designers around him. Serov had known the family since childhood. One afternoon Mamontov's 12-year-old daughter Vera sat down at a table, and he asked her to hold still.

She sat for him for most of a month. What he painted was a dark-eyed girl in a pink blouse at a table strewn with peaches, autumn light pouring in behind her. He called it simply a portrait, but it caught something studio portraiture usually killed off, a real child on a real ordinary day. Serov's friend and biographer Igor Grabar later called Girl with Peaches the finest thing in Russian painting.

Serov had trained under Ilya Repin, the leading Russian realist, and in Paris, and he spent the rest of his career as the portraitist wealthy Russia could not do without, painting merchants, aristocrats and the imperial family. He grew famously exacting, dragging sitters back for dozens of sessions. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 1911, at 46. Vera Mamontova, the girl with the peaches, had died four years before him, of pneumonia, at 32.