2-708-665 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

'Portrait of an unknown Woman with Headdress', 1812, (1965). French writer, novelist and political propagandist Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (1766-1817). Born in Paris, de Stael was the only child of Jacques Necker, French statesman and financier. Married unhappily in 1786 to Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein, the Swedish ambassador to France, she had many affairs, including a liaison with the author and political philosopher Benjamin Constant. She was ordered to leave France by First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte who saw her ideas as dangerous. She travelled extensively throughout Europe and arrived in St Petersburg in Russia the year this portrait, in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, was painted. From "Russian Painting of the 18th and 19th Centuries" by Vladimir Fiala. [Artia, Czechoslovakia, 1965]