LEON TOLSTOI IN A PINK ARMCHAIR, 1909 (oil on canvas)

1909//Oil on canvas In this portrait, Repin immortalizes the image of an aging Tolstoy. In 1908, when he visited her in Yasnaya Polyana, it was a man weakened by illness and undermined by the conflict that pitted him against his wife over the dissemination of his work after his death. This final portrait made during the writer's lifetime was presented at the thirty-eighth exhibition of The Ambulants, in 1910. Tolsto died in November of the same year. As a last tribute, Repin will then paint Tolstoy on the other side of life (one version in the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow and a second in the house-museum “The Penates” in Repino).