Портрет Иоанны Дзержбицкой

By the time this portrait was painted, around 1800, the country its sitter belonged to had been off the map for five years. The final partition of 1795 split what was left of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and the king Pitschmann had painted several times in Warsaw, Stanislaw August, abdicated and died in Saint Petersburg.

Pitschmann was born in Trieste and trained at the Academy in Vienna, then came to Poland in 1788 at the invitation of the Czartoryski family. He worked in Warsaw for the nobility and the merchant class until 1794 and was given a diamond ring for his portraits of the king. Then he moved to Lwow, by then the capital of the Austrian province of Galicia, and turned out more than 300 portraits over the next 12 years. In the same years he painted the Habsburg emperor Francis and his wife, and the Polish landowners the Habsburgs now ruled.