Portrait of Countess Yekaterina von Engelhardt

Portrait of Countess Yekaterina von Engelhardt is an oil-on-canvas painting created in 1796 by the French painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, from 1796.

Its subject, Yekaterina von Engelhardt, was a Russian noblewoman and lady in waiting.

[1] An earlier portrait of the same subject was produced by the artist in Naples in 1790 and is now in the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris.

She is depicted on a black background which contrasts with the warm light which seems to radiate from her look and her chest and is reflected on the cushion.

For Marie-Jo Bonnet, this painting it is an ode to feminine beauty, softness and tranquillity; she also underlines that the painting of Vigée Le Brun was not seen by her contemporaries as typically feminine, but as a personification of grace as understood in her time.