Along with portraits of remarkable figures of art and culture, Repin painted a large number of custom-made portraits, in which he also proved to be an unsurpassed realist. The artist created ‘Portrait of Elizaveta Dmitrievna Botkina’ in 1881. The person depicted on it was the daughter of the famous executive and collector Dmitry Petrovich Botkin, niece of Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet. In 1889, Elizaveta Dmitrievna married engineer Konstantin Gustavovich Dunker, receiving from Fet a congratulatory letter written on the occasion of the marriage of his beloved niece.

The Dunker couple preserved in the history of Russian art by the fact that they ‘started the fashion for paintings by M. A. Vrubel’, deciding to decorate the walls of their mansion on Povarskaya Street in Moscow with Vrubel’s art. Nevertheless, all these happy events and worries about setting the family nest are yet to come, while from the Repin’s portrait, a not so beautiful, but attractive young woman in white-blue foam dress richly decorated with lace and flowers looks at us attentively. The freshness and naturalness of the model are perfectly conveyed by the master, they are emphasized by the carefully written details of the heroine’s spectacular toilet and serene and light colors prevailing on the canvas. Everything breathes harmony, beauty and peace here, and luxurious accessories taken from the father’s collection and an old massive armchair, in which the young model is so laid-back, hint at her belonging to a rich and respectable family. 

The museum’s collection also contains a peculiar portrait written in 1894 of the artist’s pet - a dog named Pegasus. Despite the fact that Repin was not an animal painter, he devoted many drawings and paintings to his favorite, and a special soulful feeling and genuine artisanship mark all of them.