Portrait of Countess Samoilova with (Giovanina) Amazilia Pacini and black boy

Portrait of Countess Samoilova with Giovanina Amazilia Pacini and a Black Boy, painted c. 1826 and held in an unspecified location, belongs to the remarkable series of portraits Bryullov made of the Russian Countess Yulia Samoilova — one of the most celebrated beauties and personalities of early nineteenth-century European high society and the painter's great love and recurring muse. Samoilova, an immensely wealthy Russian aristocrat who spent much of her life in Italy, appears in multiple Bryullov works including the monumental Horsewoman (1832) and the celebrated Last Day of Pompeii, where her features appear on multiple figures. The figures accompanying her — Giovanina Amazilia Pacini, the adopted daughter of the composer Giovanni Pacini, and a Black page boy — place the portrait within a specifically Italian aristocratic context, where the retinue of beautiful women, adopted children, and Black servants was a feature of grand portraiture extending back to the Baroque. The c. 1826 date places the work in Bryullov's early Italian years.

The multi-figure composition is more complex than a single-figure portrait, requiring the spatial organization of three figures at different heights and in different positions. Samoilova as the central figure receives the most direct illumination, with the accompanying figures providing compositional and narrative context. The Italian period palette — warm, glazed, Venetian in tone — is characteristic of this early work.