Wieńczysława Barczewska, Madame de Jurjewicz

In 1860 Paris was home to a large Polish community in exile. After the failed rising against Russian rule in 1830 and 1831, thousands of Poles, many of them noble, had settled in France, and Madame de Jurjewicz, born Wieńczysława Barczewska, spent most of her life among them. That year she sat to Franz Xaver Winterhalter, the favourite portraitist of Europe's courts, who signed the canvas with his name, the city and the year.

She sits in a white gown with a black lace shawl, one hand lifted to her hair, and the whole composition is set in an oval. The pose and the format recall the aristocratic portraits of the 18th century. The Museum of Fine Arts points to the hair itself, dark and loosened, as the detail that places the picture squarely in the middle of the 19th.

The portrait stayed in French collections for well over a century. A French countess lent it in 1928 to a Paris exhibition of Winterhalter's portraits of ladies of the Second Empire, and the museum bought it in 1998.