Portrait of princess Alexandra Golitsyna and her son Piotr

Alexandra Golitsyna was 20 when she sat for this portrait in Vienna in 1794. Born a Protasova, she had been married for three years to Prince Alexei Golitsyn, an equerry at the Russian court, and the fair-haired boy pressing his cheek to hers is their first child, Pyotr, born in 1792. Vigée Le Brun lived and worked in Vienna from 1792 to 1795, and Russian aristocrats travelling abroad were among the sitters who found her there. For the princess she borrowed from the Turkish taste then in fashion in Russian high society, winding a blue scarf round her hair like an improvised turban. Alexandra was widowed in 1800. Years later she left the Orthodox Church for Catholicism, and Pyotr was one of the children who followed her. Mother and son both died in 1842.