La princesse Karoline von Liechtenstein (1768-1831), née comtesse von Manderscheidt-Blankenheim, en Iris

By 1793 Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun had been on the road for four years. As Marie Antoinette's favourite portraitist she had fled Paris around the time the royal family fell in 1789, and she was now working her way across Europe on her reputation alone. In Vienna the commissions poured in. This is one of two large portraits she made for the Liechtenstein family, and in her memoirs she explains the idea: the young princess was so graceful, with such a sweet expression, that she pictured her as Iris, the messenger goddess of the rainbow. Karoline floats upward, her scarf streaming behind her in the colours of the rainbow. Vigee Le Brun would keep travelling east, and reached Russia a few years later.