Princess Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova, Tapestry Portrait, Imperial Russian Tapestry Manufactory, St Petersburg, circa 1759-1764, after Pietro Antonio Rotari (1707-1762), probably woven by Jean Baptiste Rondet (fl.1740-1764)

Yekaterina Romanovna Vorontsova-Dashkova (1743-1810), was daughter of Count Roman Vorontsov and she married Prince Mikhail Dashkov (although he died shortly after their marriage). The princess was a close friend to the Empress Catherine the Great and involved in the coup d'etat which resulted in Catherine being placed on the throne. Yekaterina was a prominent figure in the Russian Enlightenment. She was the first women in Europe of hold government office and was the head of the national Academy of Sciences and helped found the Russian Academy.

For a comparable tapestry portrait of Countess Elizaveta Romanovna Vorontsova (1739-1792), Mistress to Tsar Peter III and Lady in Waiting to Catherine (later Empress), woven by Rondet, signed fait par/ Rondet Mt a /Petersbourg,and dated 1762, Saint Petersburg, after a painting by an unknown artist that was formerly owned by Countess E. Vorontsova-Dashkova, see Edith Standen, European Post Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985, Vol. II, pp.803-805, No. 150.

The similarities between the signed tapestry portrait and the tapestry offered here, indicate that the weaver was likely to have been the same. Jean Baptiste Rondet was an haute-lisse weaver at the Gobelins in Paris in 1752, becoming an officer de tetes, in 1756, which was the year he left France. In 1759 he was in St Petersburg and became master tapestry weaver at the Imperial Manufactory, until his death in 1764.