Lot 502: Alexander Molinari (1772-1831)

Alexander Molinari (1772-1831)
Portrait of Princess Ekaterina Andreevna Shcherbatov (1789-1810)
pencil on paper
7 1/8 x 5 1/8 in. (18.1 x 13.1 cm.)
Executed in 1809

Moscow, Museum of Private Collections, Pushkin's Contemporaries: 100 Portraits in Watercolour from a Parisian Collection, May - July 1999.

M. Baruch & I. Sakharova, Russian Portraits in Watercolour, 1825-1855, Paris, 1994, pp. 112 and 113 illustrated.

Collection of the Counts Stroganov, Rome.

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Painted the year before her death, Princess Ekaterina was the daughter of Prince Andrei Ivanovich Viazemsky (1746/50-1807). It was while travelling through Europe that Andrei met Eugenia Kine, the young Irish bride of a French army officer and the daughter of John O'Reilly. To the chagrin of her parents, the Prince spirited the girl off to Russia. They were married in the late 1780s and had two children, Ekaterina and Peter, a poet, critic and friend of Pushkin. Ekaterina married Prince Alexei Grigorievich Shcherbatov (1776-1848) in 1809 only to die in childbirth the following year.