Countess Nicolai, née Potocka

Lampi reached Warsaw in the autumn of 1788, the season the long parliament later called the Four-Year Sejm opened, and in some seven months there he painted a long run of Polish aristocrats. This sitter belongs to that stay. The museum dates the picture to around 1789 and names her only as Countess Nicolai, born a Potocka, a daughter of one of the richest magnate families in Poland. The painter wraps her in a wine-red velvet cloak lined with white fur, her hands tucked into a fur muff, and piles her ash-grey curls high under a pale ribbon flecked with gold. She looks past us, off to the side. His signature, Lampi pinxit, sits low on the right.