Portrait of Grand Duchess Elizaveta Feodorovna

In the Photo Gallery, this painting can be seen in the artists studio in photograph #37.

In 2016, we received an email inquiry from The Tretyakov Museum in Moscow asking if we were certain this was Elizabeth, sister of the Empress Alexandra or Alexandra herself.  They have the painting and were certain that it was Alexandra. After seeing our site however, they delved further and found that the necklace the woman is wearing in the portrait was one that Elizabeth's husband gave to her for their wedding. The question was now settled...this is a painting done by Victor Stember of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna.  A photo of this painting can be seen on Stember's wall of his studio in photo #37 as well as others that are in the possession of the family.  In the memoir book of Victor Stember, his daughter also delineates some of the portraits she remembers her father painting and she states that he painted one of Elizabeth 'in a pink dress' and another 'in a blue dress.'   

The sitting itself is recorded: Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich noted in his diary that the portrait was painted at Ilyinskoye on May 27, 1901. The painting measures 152 x 101 cm and came to the Tretyakov Gallery from Gatchina Palace in 1932.¹ The museum's own magazine still listed it as a portrait of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna in 2004, which is the attribution the family's photographs helped correct. In 2018 it was shown in Frankfurt in the exhibition "Hessian Princesses in Russian History."²

Below is the biography of her sister Elizabeth:

Elizabeth Feodorovna was a Princess of Hesse and by Rhine (1864-1918). She married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia. She was the older sister of Alexandra, the last Czarina of Russia, as well as the granddaughter of Queen Victoria.  

Elisabeth became famous in Russian Society for her beauty and charitable works among the poor.  After the Socialist Revolutionary Party's combat Organization murdered her husband with a dynamite bomb in 1905, Elisabeth publicly forgive his murderer and campaigned without success for him to be pardoned.  She then departed the Imperial Court and became a nun, founding the Marfo-Mariinsky (Martha and Mary) Convent dedicated to helping the downtrodden of Moscow.  In 1918 she was arrested and ultimately executed by the Bolsheviks.  In 1981 Elisabeth was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

¹ Unconfirmed. The size and the 1932 transfer from Gatchina come from secondary sources found in the 2026 research, not from the Tretyakov's own catalog. A charity-project web page gives a different Tretyakov record for a portrait of the same sitter (133.7 x 75.2 cm, inventory 21966), and the two records have not yet been reconciled with the museum.

² Unconfirmed. The Frankfurt showing is reported by secondary sources on the 2017-2018 exhibition at the Icon Museum in Frankfurt. The exhibition catalog itself has not been checked.