Profile portrait of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, in an oval frame

The classical quality of this previously unknown portrait is comparable with a number of other profile portraits in a similar technique produced by Greuze in the early 1760s, including a self-portrait in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. WA1947.176; see Munhall, op. cit., no. 21, ill.), as well as a portrait of Sir Robert Strange in the National Galleries of Scotand (ibid., p. 86, under no. 21, fig. 69). The likeness of the Empress is based on a marble bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828), commissioned in Paris by the Count Pavel Aleksandrovich Stroganov (1774-1817) and now in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (inv. N.SK-1676; see H.H. Arnason, The Sculptures of Houdon, London, 1975, pp. 25-26, pl. 15, fig. 72). An engraving based on Houdon’s bust was commissioned by the poet Charles-François Lubersac de Livron (1730-1804) from the engraver Charles-Étienne Gaucher, to serve as the frontispiece of the Premier discours sur l’utilité et les avantages que les princes peuvent retirer de leurs voyages (Saint Petersburg and Paris, 1782), where the project for a public monument of Catherine II is discussed. The engraving was executed after the present drawing by Greuze, one of the Empress's favorite artists, whose copy of the bust must have been made from the original, possibly under Houdon's supervision ('Greuze del. Sub. Stat. Houdon').