Portrait of Krystyna Potocka watering flowers on her mother's grave

Portrait of Krystyna Potocka Watering Flowers on her Mother's Grave from 1780, now in the Palace Museum in Wilanów, is a sentimental composition combining portraiture with moral narrative. The filial piety of the young Polish noblewoman — her tender care for her mother's grave — embodied the cult of sensibility that pervaded late 18th-century culture across Europe, from Sterne's novels to Rousseau's philosophical writing to the graveyard poetry of Collins and Gray. Kauffmann painted the Polish Potocka family on multiple occasions, including Anna Potocka in 1791, reflecting the ongoing patronage relationship between the painter and one of Poland's most powerful aristocratic clans. The Wilanów Palace museum, which documents Polish royal and aristocratic culture through its collection of portraits and decorative arts, holds this sentimental portrait as evidence of the Polish aristocracy's participation in the European culture of sensibility that transcended national borders. The garden setting — a graveyard with flowers, combining nature's renewal with memorial observation — provides both a narrative context and a visual setting that Kauffmann renders with her characteristic soft palette and delicate, emotionally engaged figure painting.

The painting combines portrait likeness with narrative sentiment, using the graveyard setting and tender gesture to create an image of filial devotion rendered in Kauffmann's characteristic soft palette.