少女時代のヴェラ・レーピナの肖像

Repin began this in the summer of 1874 at Veules, a fishing village on the Normandy coast where he had taken his family for the season, and reworked it after they went back to Paris in the autumn. He was abroad on a travelling stipend from the Petersburg Academy, on a trip that kept him out of Russia from 1873 to 1876. His daughter Vera, named after her mother, was two years old. Repin himself said he had painted her a la Manet, and the loose light handling is a long way from the heavy Volga subjects that had made his name at home the year before. She sits on a chair with a ball of wool in her hands, in a long dress and a straw hat with a ribbon.