#wealth

This was a commission — her parents were rich Viennese patrons who put money behind a lot of the design world there. The story goes she was nine, and that she picked how she wanted to stand herself.

The man in it was a rich young aristocrat with a habit of ordering paintings of himself — this was one of several he commissioned from the same painter, going by the museum's own notes. His father, I gather, had been a heavyweight in French law and politics, so the family was well used to being looked at.

Supposedly the commission was turned down flat at first, and only accepted after an actual meeting with her — then it dragged on for something like a decade, with a whole second painting of her finished years after this one. Nobody, it seems, was in any hurry.

According to Wikipedia he spent most of his life in Paris painting rich Americans abroad. His father had made a fortune in sugar, so he had the run of that world rather than having to talk his way into it. Portraits like this were partly a business — you paid to be seen looking like this.