Portrait de la princesse Belozersky

Vigee Le Brun painted this in 1798, deep into the long exile the French Revolution had forced on her, during the years she spent in Russia. The sitter, Anna Belozersky, was in her mid-twenties, daughter of a man who had served as secretary to Catherine the Great. For a princess it is a strikingly plain picture. Vigee Le Brun, famous at home for flattering her subjects with silks and jewels, here dresses the young woman simply and keeps her almost girlish, a little windblown, as if met on a walk rather than received at court. The painter had built her whole career on the aristocracy of France that had just collapsed, and here she was, doing the same work for the aristocracy of the tsars.