Lot 2094 Dα

This small-format portrait depicts the Russian Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna (1788-1819), a daughter of Tzar Paul I and his second wife Maria Fyodorovna, a Princess of Württemberg by birth. After marriage proposals to both the Bavarian Crown Prince Ludwig and Napoleon Bonaparte failed, Catherine Pavlovna was married to Duke Georg von Oldenburg in 1809. After his early death in 1812, she married the Württemberg Crown Prince Wilhelm four years later and became Queen of Württemberg within only a few months. Following her early death at the age of 30, King Wilhelm I arranged for a burial chapel to be built on Württemberg mountain near Stuttgart, where she was buried in 1824.
This portrait of the young Russian Grand Duchess in an interior furnished with draperies and columns has in the past been attributed to Johann Friedrich August Tischbein, an ascription which Martin Franke, the author of his catalogue raisonné, rejects for good reasons. Instead, he attributes the work to the French portraitist Jean-Laurent Mosnier, who was already active at the Russian tzar's court before Tischbein, working there from 1801 until his early death and producing numerous portraits of the tzar's family. Franke sees in the present work “a largely completed oil sketch [...], which clarified to the potential client the disposition of the large-format version to be produced. [...] The small-format work was probably created around 1806/07 in St. Petersburg; a large-format execution has not been discovered so far in Mosnier's oeuvre.”
We would like to thank Dr Martin Franke for attributing the painting to Jean-Laurent Mosnier and for his kind support in cataloguing this work.