Portrait of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, king of Poland

Vigee Le Brun painted this in Saint Petersburg in 1797, and nearly everyone involved was someone history had displaced. She had been Marie Antoinette's favourite painter and had fled France when the Revolution turned on the court. Her sitter, Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, was the last king of Poland, a country carved up and wiped off the map by its neighbours only two years earlier. He now lived in Russia as a guest of the very empire that had helped undo him. She shows him old and plainly tired, the royal trappings kept to a minimum. He died there the next year, in 1798, and the Russian emperor gave the deposed king a grand funeral.