Johann Baptist von Lampi the Elder

Johann Baptist von Lampi followed European power eastward, and it made him rich. Trained in northern Italy and established in Vienna, where Emperor Joseph II named him a professor at the Academy in 1786, he was soon invited to Warsaw by Stanisław August, the last king of Poland, whose court he painted through its final years.

When Poland was carved up among its neighbors, Lampi moved on to Saint Petersburg in 1791. There he became a favorite of Catherine the Great, painting the aging empress and the wider imperial family, and was granted a hereditary title of nobility. Russian sitters paid handsomely for his smooth, flattering likenesses, and he built a considerable fortune before returning to Vienna for good.

He worked in the elegant manner that sits between late Baroque and Neoclassicism, all silk, medals and composed dignity. Both his sons became painters too. The elder, also named Johann Baptist, stayed on in Russia for years, working in his father's style. Lampi died in Vienna in 1830, at 78. His portraits of Catherine and her court still hang in the Hermitage and other Russian collections.