Портрет Лидии Павловны Штейнгель

Repin painted the baroness in 1895, full length, in a white dress with a red rose at the breast. She was Lidia Pavlovna, married to Baron Ivan Steingel, and people around her called her Venus Pavlovna.

The rest of her life went another way. The marriage ended in 1903, her second husband, a general, disappeared in 1919, and after the revolution she kept quiet about where she came from and worked as a nurse in Leningrad hospitals. In 1930, short of money, she sold this portrait to a second-hand shop. She died in the siege of Leningrad in 1942, at 74, of hunger.

The buyer in 1930 had been Lidia Ruslanova, the folk singer whose voice the whole Soviet Union knew and who spent her fees on Russian paintings. When she was arrested in 1948 the 132 canvases in her flat were seized. The Minsk museum acquired 43 works from her collection over the decades that followed, this portrait among them.