Dorothea, Princess Lieven, stipple engraving by Frederick Christian Lewis Sr, after Sir Thomas Lawrence © National Portrait Gallery, London
Dorothea Lieven, a Baltic Russian raised in the court of Catherine the Great, was a woman about whom it was impossible to be neutral. “There never figured on the Courtly stage a female intriguer more restless, more arrogant, more mischievous, more (politically, and therefore we mean it not offensively) odious than this supercilious Ambassadress,” said a rival. “It is not fashionable,” she informed her lover, the Austrian Chancellor, Prince Metternich, “where I am not.” She was also reputed to have had an affair with Lord Palmerston, although there is no firm proof. “This beautiful England,” she wrote to her brother on arriving for the first time, “is always the same – an endless chain of perfections which appeal to the reason but leave the imagination untouched.” England is not, she concluded, “the country of emotions.”
38 | Koopman Rare Art