My other blog, for aesthetically pleasing things. This is my side blog, so if I reblog something from you I probably follow you on my main one. Feel free to submit.
“The youngest daughter of Russian Emperor Nicholas I and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, Alexandra Nikolaevna (nicknamed Adini in the family circle) was just fifteen years old when she posed for Christina Robertson in the summer of 1840 at the imperial summer residence, the Great Peterhof Palace… Contemporaries praised untiringly her unworldly character, her angelic kindness, her meekness and gentleness… Robertson showed her with a bouquet of cornflowers, fully in keeping with the lack of artifice that made her so loved. To her left on the balustrade lie an open album and a pencil. For Alexandra, drawing and particularly music were not merely part of acquiring the accomplishments of a noble young lady; she was a talented singer and took lessons from the renowned singer Henrietta Sontag. But tuberculosis put an end first to her lessons and then to her brief life: she died just a few years after the portrait was completed.”
– from An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum.
