Countess Ekaterina Vassilievna Skavronskaia

Vigee Le Brun had been Marie Antoinette's favourite portraitist, which made France dangerous for her once the Revolution came. She fled in 1789 and spent years working her way across Europe's courts, and by 1796 she was in Saint Petersburg painting for Russian high society. This sitter was Countess Skavronskaia, a niece of the powerful Prince Potemkin and a lady-in-waiting to Catherine the Great, famous in her day for a dreamy, almost boneless idleness. Vigee Le Brun shows her smiling softly in white and blue, leaning on a red cushion against a dark ground. She had already painted the countess once, in Naples six years earlier. She signed this one in full, adding that it was made in Saint Petersburg in 1796. It is now in the Louvre.