Comtesse Pélagie Róża Potocka Sapieha

In the wake of the French Revolution, the painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun fled France with her young daughter, Julie. Taking refuge in Turin in August 1792, they were joined by Rivière, the older brother of Vigée Le Brun's sister-in-law, Suzanne Vigée (b. 1764). An accomplished painter himself, he had studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden and the Académie royale in Paris. For the next nine years, Rivière accompanied his kinswomen on their peregrinations through Europe and Russia. In her memoirs Vigée Le Brun left an affectionate pen portrait of her traveling companion: "Cet aimable homme possédait tous les talents. . . . Le fait est qu'il peignait très-bien, et copiait tous mes portraits en grande miniature à l'huile" (This amiable man possessed every talent. . . . The fact is that he painted very well, and copied all my portraits as large miniatures in oil).
This portrait is one of Rivière's "grande miniatures," an oval reduction of Vigée Le Brun's portrait of comtesse Pélagie Roza Potocka Sapieha (1775-1846). The original, rectangular canvas is in the château de Montrésor, France, and depicts the sitter seated in three-quarter length. In 1793, at the age of eighteen, Pélagie, a Polish aristocrat, married Prince Franciszek Sapieha (1772-1829); the couple honeymooned in Vienna, where Vigée Le Brun was living from 1793 to 1794. Vigée Le Brun painted two portraits of the young bride: the one on which the present painting is based, and a second portrait of Pélagie dancing with a shawl, now in the Royal Castle, Warsaw. Historically, the sitter in the present portrait was misidentified as Julie Le Brun, who was one of her mother's favorite subjects.