Lot 125: Giovanni Battista Damon Ortolani, 1750-1812 , portrait of Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya oil on canvas

oil on canvas

40 by 35cm., 15¾ by 13¾in.

For a larger version of the same portrait see G.Kropivinitskaya V. Tropinin and Moscow Artists of his Time, St Petersburg 1977, pl.55.

Princess Maria Alexandrova Vasilchikova, St. Petersburg
Galerie Basmadjian, Paris
Sotheby's London, Icons, Russian pictures and Works of Art, 15 June 1995, Lot 25

Ortolani studied in Rome and Florence and worked in Vienna, St Petersburg and Moscow at the turn of the century. Among his best-known portraits are those of Prince Sergei Golitsyn and the famous writer Nikolai Karamzin, who called Ortolani 'the best painter around' in a letter to his brother Vasily. Ekaterina Alexandrovna Dolgorukaya (1758-1842) was the daughter of the Governor of St. Petersburg, Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Golytsin and the Hungarian Countess Kliupfel. Her uncle, the diplomat and art patron Dmitri Mikhailovich Golytsin, was Russian Ambassador to Vienna under Catherine II and founder of the Golytsin hospital in Moscow. Ortolani's 1804 version of Ekaterina's portrait is kept in the Russian State Cultural Archives.