Жертва фанатизма

In the 1890s, Mykola Pymonenko read a newspaper report from Volhynia, in the western Russian Empire, about a young Jewish woman who had fallen in love with a Ukrainian blacksmith and chosen to be baptised so she could marry him. He travelled to the town of Kremenets and made studies from life there before building this large canvas around the moment she is driven from her own community. She clings to a fence in a torn shirt, a small cross at her neck, her father's hand raised in refusal, her mother turned away in tears. When it was shown, the picture struck a nerve on all sides and was soon reproduced on postcards across the empire. Pymonenko went on to paint the subject two more times.