Portrait of Elena Pavlovna of Russia (1784-1803)

Elena Pavlovna (1784-1803) was the third daughter of Paul I and Maria Feodorovna, who died at nineteen after a troubled marriage to the Hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Borovikovsky painted her in 1797, when she was thirteen, in the year before her marriage — a time when the Russian imperial court was producing a series of portraits of Paul's daughters for diplomatic circulation as part of the marriage negotiations that would determine their futures. The portrait is held at Gatchina, where Paul I resided and where the family's most intimate portraits were kept. The youth of the sitter is apparent in the portrait's delicate, gentle handling, which captures a girl on the threshold of a destiny she had no power to shape.

The canvas shows Borovikovsky's careful adaptation of his technique to a young sitter, with exceptionally soft modelling and a pale, luminous palette appropriate to adolescent skin. The outdoor setting — park, trees, gentle sky — provides the Sentimentalist atmosphere Borovikovsky favoured for female subjects. The figure's slight, young form is depicted with tender attention.