Portrait of Vittorio Alfieri and Louise Stolberg d’Albany

The famous Piedmontese poet and playwright is shown in an intimate setting, in conversation with his companion, the Belgian princess Louise Stolberg; The letter the countess holds in her hand bears a dedication to her friend Tommaso Valperga di Caluso, a man of letters, philosopher, mathematician, and the recipient of the painting. In the background we see a view of Florence, which the poet chose as his home in 1792. And it was in Florence that the couple met the French painter François-Xavier Fabre, a former pupil of Jacques-Louis David in Paris on a scholarship at the Académie de France in Rome. He became great friends and was the poet’s official portraitist, and in the end he was named as the univer-sal heir of the Countess of Albany. During his career as an academic painter, Fabre took on a number of different genres: he was the portraitist of local aristocrats and European personalities on their way through Florence, but also a history and landscape painter.