Maria de Wilde

She was born and died in Amsterdam, where she played an active part in the upper-class bourgeois world of artists and writers, and gained a reputation by engraving her wealthy father's art collection.

[2] There appears to have been some doubt about her death date: earlier biographies list it as unknown,[1][3][4] as does de Jeu's 2000 study of women poets of the Dutch Republic.

[2] Maria was well-educated and while not much is known of her life, all evidence indicates she was a cultured person with artistic talent; she was praised for her singing voice, her poetry, and her harpsichord playing.

[6] Maria made an engraving of this meeting between the tsar and her father, which marks "the beginning of the West European classical tradition in Russia".

[5] Her first play, Abradates en Panthea, was published anonymously with the motto Sine Pallade nihil ("nothing without Pallas") on the title page, a phrase with which she became associated.

[5] After her marriage she stopped publishing, and while she may have died in 1729, a farce, Het zwervende portret, appeared in 1742 with her name and motto on the title page; the play is an adaptation of Pierre-François Godard de Beauchamps's Le portrait.