Vergil liest Augustus und Octavia aus der Aeneis vor

The scene comes from an old story. The poet Virgil reads aloud to the emperor Augustus and his sister Octavia, and when he reaches the lines mourning Marcellus, Octavia's dead young son, she faints. Kauffmann paints the exact instant she slips down, the men caught mid-gesture around her. She made it in 1788 for Stanislaw August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, who hung it in his palace in Warsaw. Within a few years his kingdom would be carved up by its neighbours and cease to exist, and the picture eventually travelled east to Russia. Through the arch behind the figures you can see the Capitol and the temple of Jupiter, the Rome that Kauffmann had studied at first hand before she settled there to work.