Porträt der Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse) (1872-1918)

Portrait of Alexandra Feodorovna — Alix of Hesse (1872–1918) — painted in 1896, the year of her husband Nicholas II's coronation, depicts the last Empress of Russia at the moment of her accession to the most prestigious position in the tsarist social order. Alix of Hesse, a German princess and granddaughter of Queen Victoria, had converted to Orthodoxy upon her marriage to Nicholas in 1894 and took the Russian name Alexandra Feodorovna. The coronation year of 1896 was a moment of elaborate court ceremony and official portraiture, when the new imperial couple sat for numerous artists. Makovsky's portrait of the new Empress would have been a commission of extraordinary prestige, demanding the full resources of his mature portrait technique. The subsequent history of Alexandra and Nicholas — revolutionary overthrow, imprisonment, and execution in 1918 — gives this portrait a tragic retrospective dimension.

Oil paint on canvas with the grand-manner portrait treatment appropriate to an imperial subject. Makovsky would have been expected to convey both the physical presence of the Empress and the symbolic grandeur of her new position, requiring careful management of dress, setting, and compositional format.