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Portrait of Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna, later Queen of Württemberg
Alois Gustav Rockstuhl (Russian, 1798–1877)
c. 1860
- Medium
- watercolor on ivory on a gilt metal mount
- Classification
- Portrait Miniature
- Dimensions
- Framed: 6 x 5 cm (2 3/8 x 1 15/16 in.); Unframed: 5.7 x 4.6 cm (2 1/4 x 1 13/16 in.)
- Culture
- Russia
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Modern European Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Bequest of Muriel Butkin
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
The miniature of Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna, later Queen of Württemberg, is among the finest of Alois Gustav Rockstuhl's portraits. It portrays Catherine at around 4 years of age and is one of the few miniatures of children in the museum's collection. This work was painted several decades after Catherine's death and is based on a large-scale, late 18th-century oil painting by Petr Zharkov. A member of Catherine's family likely commissioned the portrait from Rockstuhl as a memento. Zharkov also painted Catherine's three sisters in similar poses, and although Rockstuhl probably reproduced these portraits in miniature as well, the location of each is currently unknown. The star of the Order of Saint Catherine is partially hidden beneath the delicate white ruffled neckline of her dress. The only order available to women in imperial Russia, it established Catherine as a member of the royal family while also referring to her saintly namesake. Catherine grew to be an intelligent and charming woman, deeply loved by her older brother Tsar Alexander I and famous for rejecting the marriage proposal of Napoleon Bonaparte. Catherine married twice, gaining the title Queen of Württemberg…
