Elise Ransonnet-Villez
1843–1899 · Austrian
The story
Elise Ransonnet-Villez was a Viennese painter, born in the Austrian capital in 1843. She trained with two of the most sought-after portraitists of the age, Franz von Lenbach and Heinrich von Angeli, both of whom painted the crowned heads of central Europe, and she made her own name in portraiture, exhibiting in Vienna and Munich.
Her best-remembered work is a portrait of the composer Franz Liszt, painted in 1879. A year earlier she had made the self-portrait now in the Uffizi, a modest oil that entered the gallery's collection of artists' likenesses. Through marriage to a Hungarian count she became a baroness, and she died in 1899 in Brixen, a town in the Tyrol.