Portrait of Maria Borisovna Chukovskaya 1909

Ilya Repin made this watercolor portrait of Maria Borisovna Chukovskaya with what looks like simple strokes and a pared-down palette. There is such sensitivity in how he’s laid down the washes, leaving areas of the paper bare, like hesitant pauses in a conversation. The way he captures the dark tones of Maria’s high-necked dress and the inkiness of her hair with such watery applications of pigment is pretty remarkable. You can really see the physical properties of the medium at play. There's a gorgeous dark pool of color just behind her head, a concentrated note of pigment that bleeds softly into the pale ground, which, for me, becomes a metaphor for memory, or the lingering trace of a feeling. Repin’s work reminds me a little of Whistler's tonal studies, both artists seemed interested in capturing a mood or atmosphere rather than just likeness, suggesting that maybe art is more about suggestion than description, an ongoing experiment in visual thinking.