Self-portrait

The Counis family came to Florence on Napoleon's coattails. In 1810 the enamel painter Alexis-Francois Counis, trained in the Geneva miniature tradition, was called to the Tuscan court of Elisa Baciocchi, Napoleon's sister, who was then running the grand duchy. This is his daughter, painted by her own hand in 1839, when she was in her late twenties and Florence had long since returned to its Habsburg-Lorraine grand dukes. Elisa Counis worked in the same fine, patient craft as her father, and almost nothing else about her survives in the record. She died in 1847, only 35 years old. It was her grieving father who gave this portrait to the Uffizi, so that the gallery's long line of artists' faces would include hers.