"I remember that in the private Tenishev studio run by Repin, a student turned up in our group who proved to be colour-blind

"I remember that in the private Tenishev studio run by Repin, a student turned up in our group who proved to be colour-blind. He drew well, but when he took up the brush, faces and objects acquired unnatural colours and shades under his hand. Repin did not know that the young man, admitted without his knowledge, suffered from colour-blindness; he watched him work for a while, and then broke out into a lecture of nearly half an hour. He spoke quickly, as if out of breath, gesticulating vigorously; his arguments were so vivid and convincing that this "involuntary lecture" made a strong impression on everyone present. The whole "lecture" came down, in essence, to the proof that the human body has its own basic tone, that this tone must be guarded and preserved; any influence of various reflexes and reflections is a secondary matter, something superficial; these reflexes and reflections lead in painting to colourfulness, but colourfulness must not drown out the basic tone.
"Guard the basic tone, guard it!" Repin urged. "And what have you got here? Where did that blue under the armpit come from?" he went on, never taking his eyes off the colour-blind student. He then began to explain, showing on his own hands, that if you join your hands with the palms upward and then begin to bring palm close to palm, the colouring of the palms grows warmer and warmer. "Flesh warms flesh," Ilya Yefimovich insisted to the colour-blind student, "but with you it is cold under the armpit." He went on to speak of the basic laws of the colouring of the body, of how the forehead always differs in colour from the cheeks, and how knees and elbows will always be pinker in relation to the general tone of the body.

Ilya Yefimovich went on persuading him for a long time. When he learned that the young man was colour-blind, he advised him to study not painting but engraving and etching. Later this student achieved respectable results in those branches of the fine arts."

The painter and teacher Nikolai Yakovlevich Borisov, who knew Repin from 1896 to 1907 and lived in his apartment at the Academy of Arts for about two and a half years. He studied in Ilya Repin's Tenishev studio, and then, in 1899–1907, at the Academy of Arts.