Repin's last self-portrait of 1920 and the artist's hard life in Kuokkala

Repin painted his last self-portrait in 1920, at the age of 76. Those years proved a very hard time in his life. His wife had been dead for some years, and for some years he had been cut off from family and friends by borders: after the revolution the village of Kuokkala found itself within independent Finland. Repin's savings had burned up in the banks of tsarist Russia, and he was left, to all intents and purposes, without means of subsistence.

Repin wrote to Korney Chukovsky of his hopeless condition and complete solitude. The portrait conveys that sense of anguish.

In the self-portrait the artist wears a fur coat and a fur hat. The curious hat is displayed in the studio exhibition next to the work. A man accustomed to sleeping almost in the open air at twenty below zero, he was cold in his own house: firewood was short and provisions were poor. Beside the hat lies the famous hanging palette worn “on the belt”, with which Repin worked from the 1890s because of the loss of mobility in the fingers of his right hand.