Stanisław Augustus with masonic emblem on his breast

By 1797 the man in this portrait had no country left to rule. Two years earlier the final partition had wiped Poland off the map, and Stanisław August Poniatowski, its last king, was living out his forced abdication in Saint Petersburg, a guest of the Russian court that had helped undo him. The woman painting him was an exile too. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun had been Marie Antoinette's favourite portraitist until the French Revolution sent her fleeing across Europe, and by now she kept a studio in the Russian capital. The two took to each other, and she painted him more than once that year. This is the version with a small masonic emblem pinned to his breast, a nod to his patronage of Polish freemasonry. In her memoirs she wrote that his left eye had looked dimmer than his right, and that she read it as a sign his life was near its close. He suffered a stroke soon after and died in February 1798, at 66.