Portrait of Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Alexeyevna

This 1795 portrait of Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Alexeyevna at the Hermitage depicts the future empress consort in her early years at the Russian court. Born Princess Louise of Baden, she married the future Tsar Alexander I in 1793, and Vigée Le Brun’s portraits captured her youthful beauty during a period of relative happiness before the political crises of Alexander’s reign. Vigée Le Brun was the most technically accomplished and socially successful woman painter of the eighteenth century, achieving membership of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1783 and a clientele that extended from the French royal family to the courts of Russia, Austria, and Italy during her decade of exile following the Revolution. Her portrait manner combined the neoclassical formal values of her training with a quality of feminine intimacy and emotional warmth that made her portraits of women and children especially celebrated. Her ability to make her sitters appear simultaneously dignified and approachable was the technical foundation of her social success.

Vigée Le Brun renders the young grand duchess with particular delicacy, emphasizing the celebrated beauty that made Elizaveta the most admired woman at the Russian court. The luminous technique is at its most refined in this flattering portrait.