Nadia Repina

Repin gave this portrait of his daughter Nadya, who was about seven and sat for it in a pink dress, to the painter Alexei Bogolyubov, an old friend of the family and the girl's godfather. Bogolyubov had a project in hand. He was building a public art museum for Saratov, a Volga city some 800 kilometres from Moscow, and naming it after his grandfather Alexander Radishchev, the writer Catherine the Great sent to Siberia in 1790 for a book about serfdom. It opened in 1885 and was the first art museum in Russia that anyone could simply walk into, years before the Tretyakov collection in Moscow or the Russian Museum in Petersburg were opened to the public. The portrait came to Saratov in 1897 under Bogolyubov's will.