Countess Tessin, Louise Ulrika Sparre af Sundby

In 1740 Count Carl Gustaf Tessin, Sweden's ambassador in Paris and one of the great collectors of his time, ordered a portrait of his wife from Nattier. Ulla Tessin, born Louise Ulrika Sparre, was about 30. Nattier signed and dated the canvas in 1741, and that August it went by ship to Stockholm.

It is a plainer picture than the goddesses he is remembered for. She wears a black hood tied loosely under her chin and a red mantle lined with dark fur, with a yellow bow at her breast, and she looks out from inside a painted stone oval.

In Sweden the portrait outlived its story. It passed through other hands and came back to Paris, and when the collector Étienne Malécot left it to the Louvre in 1895, nobody knew who she was. Her name was given back to her only in 1929, by Count Arnauld Doria, in his book on Louis Tocqué, a portrait painter who had married Nattier's daughter.