The Countess von Schoenfeld with Her Daughter

This portrait was painted in Vienna in 1793 and then stayed with the sitter's family for 144 years. The young mother is Countess Ursula von Schönfeld, born into the Fries family, one of the richest banking houses in Vienna, and married to a Saxon diplomat. Vigée Le Brun seats her beside a column with mountains opening up behind her and a green shawl drawn over her hair, while her little girl climbs into her lap and wraps an arm round her neck. In June 1937, nine months before Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, the Schönfelds sold it to Jacques Seligmann, a Paris art dealer who also traded in New York. The painting hung at the New York World's Fair in 1940. Ten years later the five-and-dime magnate Samuel H. Kress bought it, and through his foundation it came to the University of Arizona, where it has been on view in Tucson since the early 1950s.