Haystack

Valentin Serov painted Girl with Peaches at twenty two and spent the rest of his life being measured against it. The picture is loose, bright and informal in a way Russian portraiture had not been, and he never entirely repeated it. He had an unusual apprenticeship. His father was a composer, Repin taught him as a boy, and he trained under Chistyakov at the academy. The early work is warm and domestic. The later portraits, particularly of aristocrats and industrialists, get sharper and colder, and several sitters disliked what he saw in them. He resigned from the academy in protest after troops fired on demonstrators in 1905. Toward the end he was moving into something flatter and more decorative, seen in the Ida Rubinstein portrait of 1910, which divided opinion sharply and still does.