Dmitri Alekseyevich Golitsyn

Prince Dmitri Alekseyevich Golitsyn FRS (21 December 1728 – 16 March 1803) was a Russian diplomat, art agent, author, volcanologist and mineralogist.

The nineteen-year-old Countess had accompanied Prince Augustus Ferdinand of Prussia (brother of Frederick the Great) and his wife Margravine Elisabeth Louise of Brandenburg-Schwedt to the spa.

An unpublished story by Diderot, Mystification, recalls how Gallitzin used the French author and an alleged Turkish doctor to intervene with a former mistress before the marriage to retrieve portraits of her lover.

Gallitzin acquired for the Hermitage many paintings from Heinrich von Brühl (1768), and in the following years from François Tronchin (1770) and Louis Antoine Crozat (1772).

[3] Houdon's portrait of Diderot, commissioned by the Russian ambassador Dmitri Alekseevich Golitsyn, and shown in terracotta at the salon of 1771, was a critical milestone for the young sculptor.

[4]In 1771 he acquired a dozen paintings after the death of Gerrit Braamcamp, but the valuable cargo on board of Vrouw Maria got lost near the coast of Finland in a storm.

In the same year the couple split and Princess moved from Kneuterdijk to a country house between The Hague and Scheveningen, the better to oversee raising her children in a way J.J. Rousseau had promoted in his "Emile, or On Education".

Before his death, Golitsyn gave his collection to the Mineralogical Museum in Jena (a weight of 1850 kg, received in December 1802), and requested to place the samples according to the system of René Just Haüy.