Portrait of a Young Woman

The museum's title for this portrait carries a question. It calls the picture Portrait of a Young Woman and adds the name Countess Worontzoff with a query, because some scholars think the sitter is Irina Ivanovna Vorontsova, born Izmailova, a Russian aristocrat who married into the Vorontsov family. If they are right, the canvas belongs to Vigée Le Brun's years in Saint Petersburg, where she was painting the Russian nobility around 1797. The identification remains a proposal. The picture surfaced in Paris in 1913, in the second posthumous sale of the collector Eugène Kraemer at the Galerie Georges Petit, where it fetched 4,300 francs and went to Edward Hodgkins of London. Four years later it came to Boston in the bequest of Maria Antoinette Evans, whose first names echo those of the French queen Vigée Le Brun had painted so often.