Portrait of Princess Tyufyakina

This 1802 portrait of Princess Tyufyakina was painted during Vigée Le Brun's Russian period, when she was resident in St Petersburg and enjoying the favour of the Russian imperial court. The Chimei Museum in Taiwan now holds this canvas — a reminder of how widely Vigée Le Brun's work has dispersed across the world from its original aristocratic contexts. Russian aristocratic women provided Vigée Le Brun with numerous commissions during her six years in Russia, and she became the most fashionable portraitist at the imperial court, producing likenesses of empresses, grand duchesses, and members of the titled nobility. This portrait belongs to a series of works that document the late eighteenth-century Russian aristocracy's participation in international European fashion and cultural life.

The warm, luminous flesh modelling characteristic of Vigée Le Brun's style is fully deployed here, the face given precedence over costume and setting. The sitter's dress and jewellery are painted with the material precision appropriate to aristocratic portraiture, each accessory given individual physical quality. The composition is warm and resolved.