Portrait of Leonia Blühdorn, the Artist’s Stepdaughter

This refined portrait shows the artist’s stepdaughter Leonia, who would later marry Viscount Gaston de Romanet and unexpectedly die a mere six years after this painting was created. The portrait was painted in the winter of 1871 in Florence, where the Rodakowski family stopped during their travels though Europe while awaiting the end of the Franco-Prussian War.

Henryk Rodakowski, widely considered the greatest Polish portraitist of the second half of the 19th century, predominantly painted likenesses of family and friends. These portraits were generally to scale, showing the subject from the knees up against a neutral backdrop. Also common to most of them was the emotional ties they revealed between the painter and the subject, which was made possible thanks to the painter’s close psychological familiarity with his subjects. In this likeness of Leonia, the painter astutely manages to reflect the young woman’s grace and beauty as well as her elegance through the pose he selects for her. Even during the artist’s lifetime, this painting was compared to works by the great Baroque artist Anthony van Dyck while the position of Leonia’s hand was said to be reminiscent of Titian’s famous Woman in a Fur Coat from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In this painting, Rodakowski exhibits an uncanny aesthetic sensitivity in the way he combines the black and red of the coat with the white of the sheer lace awash in the glow of the young woman’s jewellery. The delicate modelling of the facial features and hands further emphasises her subtlety and elegance.

Despite the stately nature of the composition, what catches our attention is the intimate atmosphere pervading the picture. The tasteful colours, precise lines and soft modelling place the Portrait of Leonia Blühdorn among Rodakowski’s finest portraits and make it one of the best female portraits in the history of Polish painting.