Self-portrait

In the Vienna of the 1870s, the fashionable way to be painted was to sit for one of the imperial capital's society portraitists. Elise Ransonnet-Villez trained with two of them, Franz von Lenbach and Heinrich von Angeli, and moved in those same circles. She came from the aristocracy and later married a Hungarian count. She painted this self-portrait in 1878, at 35. The year after, she had one of the notable sittings of her career, painting Franz Liszt, the composer, from life. This canvas, in the sober dark-toned manner her teachers favoured, later came to Florence for the Uffizi's gallery of artists' likenesses.