老婆

This is a copy. Repin was in his last years at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg when he painted it, working from Rembrandt's portrait of an old woman of 1654, which hung then as it hangs now in the Hermitage a short walk away. Copying in the imperial galleries was ordinary student work, assigned and expected. What he was after was the quality he kept naming in Rembrandt, that the sitter seems sunk in her own thoughts and the viewer ends up taking her side. He was doing this around 1870, while preparing the biblical canvas that won him the Academy's large gold medal in 1871, and in the same stretch of months he went down the Volga and came back with the first studies for the barge haulers.