Violante Beatrice Siries

Violante Beatrice Siries grew up surrounded by fine craft in Florence, the daughter of Louis Siries, a French goldsmith and engraver who worked for the Tuscan court. She began with drawing and modelling, then in 1726 went with her family to Paris, where she studied portrait painting under Hyacinthe Rigaud, the grand portraitist of the French court, and briefly with the fashionable painter François Boucher.

Back in Florence from 1732, she was admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, the old Florentine academy of artists, and built a career as a portraitist. Her most ambitious canvas gathered fourteen figures around the Emperor Charles VI, the Habsburg ruler and father of Maria Theresa of Austria, and she painted it in 1735. The Uffizi holds three of her self-portraits, and in one she holds up a small portrait of her father. She was also the first woman the gallery allowed to sit and copy the old masters on its walls, a permission that until then had gone only to men.