Historian Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov in His Coffin.

Ilya Repin's painting of the historian Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov in his coffin was created immediately following Kostomarov's death in April 1885. Kostomarov was one of Ukraine's most important historians — a scholar who argued for the distinct identity of Ukrainian history and culture at a time when Russian imperial policy sought to subsume both. Repin, himself of Ukrainian background, had known Kostomarov personally. The decision to paint the historian in death was both a private act of mourning and a public statement: a significant figure of Ukrainian intellectual culture deserved to be commemorated in paint by Russia's greatest living painter.

The death-portrait requires the painter to capture not life but its cessation: the specific quality of repose, pallor, and stillness that distinguishes the dead from the sleeping. Repin renders this with unflinching objectivity, the face modelled in cool grey-white tones, the funerary setting handled with solemn economy.