Portrait of Izabela Czartoryska

When the Swedish painter Alexander Roslin, one of the most sought-after portraitists in Paris, painted this young Polish princess in 1774, Izabela Czartoryska was about 28 and staying in the French capital. She sits in a pale greenish gown with lace at the neck, alert and quietly self-possessed. Just two years before, in 1772, Poland's neighbours had sliced off great pieces of the country in the first of the partitions that would eventually wipe it off the map. Czartoryska spent much of her later life gathering relics of Polish history and art to keep that memory alive, and the collection she built grew into one of the first museums in Poland. This very portrait now hangs in its heir, the national collection in Krakow.