Princess Varvara Nikolaevna Gagarina (1762–1802)

Varvara Nikolaevna was born on July 7, 1762. The daughter of Prince Nikolai Mikhailovich Golitsyn (1727–1787) and Princess Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Golovina (1728–1769), she married Prince Sergei Sergeyevich Gagarin (1745–1798). She seems to have had four children, and died early in 1802 at the age of thirty-nine. As Greuze never went to St. Petersburg, the princess must have visited Paris either before or after her wedding, the date of which has not been discovered. Her upright pose is both distant and formal. Her costume is similar to the white dresses worn at the time by the French queen, Marie Antoinette (1755–1793). The oval canvas is conspicuously signed on the pedestal in the foreground at the bottom.

Katharine Baetjer 2016

Inscription: Signed (lower center): J·B·Greuze

by descent to the sitter's son, Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Gagarin (d. 1842); Prince Nikolai Nikolaievich Gagarin (1842–d. 1902); Prince Victor Nikolaievich Gagarin, Moscow (1902–d. 1912); Gagarin family (1912–23; sold to Wildenstein); [Wildenstein, New York, 1923–27; sold to Haggin]; Mrs. James B. Haggin, New York (1927–d. 1965); her sister, Mrs. William M. Haupt, New York (1965)

Nikolai Mikhailovich. Portraits russes des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Vol. 2, St. Petersburg, 1906, no. 32, ill., identifies the sitter, the daughter of Prince Nicolas Mikhaïlowitch Golitzyne and the wife of Prince Serge Serguéewitch Gagarine; as in the collection of prince V. Gagarine, Moscow.

Louis Réau. "Greuze et la Russie." L'art et les artistes 1 (1920), pp. 285–86, ill., observes that he painted both Prince and Princess Gagarin.

Anita Brookner. "Jean-Baptiste Greuze–II." Burlington Magazine 98 (June 1956), p. 196, draws attention to Greuze's Russian patrons and finds that the portrait of Princess Gagarina is among his superior productions of the 1780s.

Anita Brookner. Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-century Phenomenon. Greenwich, Conn., 1972, pp. 80, 126–27, dates it about 1786 on grounds of costume.

Edgar Munhall. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1725–1805. Ed. Joseph Focarino. Exh. cat.Hartford, 1976, p. 152, compares it to "Woman with a Spaniel, Presumed Portrait of Madame de Porcin" (Musée d'Angers).

James Thompson. "Jean-Baptiste Greuze." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 47 (Winter 1989/90), pp. 41–42, 44, 47, ill. (color), suggests it was a wedding portrait painted when the sitter was about twenty years old, or about 1780.

Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 379, ill.

Neil Jeffares. Minutiae at the Met. March 29, 2019, unpaginated, ill. (color detail) [https://neiljeffares.wordpress.com/2019/03/29/minutiae-at-the-met/], draws attention to a 1792 portrait of her by Füger (Nationalgalerie, Berlin, inv. A I 947).

Katharine Baetjer. French Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Early Eighteenth Century through the Revolution. New York, 2019, pp. 220–23, no. 67, ill. (color).