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For a long time, no one knew the name of this young woman with her with her sketch pad and pencil – and that was nothing unusual for a woman’s portrait.

“In the history of art, in contrast to male portraits, there was often far less interest in exactly WHO was portrayed in women’s portraits, especially in older paintings, than in the – in inverted commas – ‘beauty’ of the woman portrayed.”

Thanks to curator Holger Birkholz, we now know the woman portrayed in this work is Countess Thekla Ludolf, née Weyssenhoff:

“In this case, identifying this figure required a long period of research and, ultimately, a stroke of luck. In a collection in Washington, I came across a friendship album with a copy of this painting in watercolours – and underneath it had the name of the woman depicted.”

The artist painted the countess with her sketching things – as a “dilettante” in nineteenth-century usage, the equivalent of today’s “amateur artist”. In those days, drawing lessons were part of the education of aristocratic and well-situated young women. If they travelled, they could draw the views on their journey. At that time, friendship and commonplace books were very popular, and entries were often accompanied by sketches:

“By writing some suitable poem or epigram into a friendship book, you demonstrated publicly, as it were, your friendship with the book’s owner. And you could always add – or were expected to add – little sketches or watercolours. So one of these friendship books held the key to the name of the woman in this painting.”

In the era of Romanticism quite a few women were professional artists. Yet although the Dresden Collections hold 600 paintings from this period, only three works are by women.

“Two are still lifes by Therese Richter, and the other painting is a portrait of a child by Emilie Lachaud de Loqueyssie. This low number is a fairly glaring disparity, especially when you consider that women artists accounted for 20 per cent of works in the Dresden art academy exhibitions in the first half of the nineteenth century.”

One reason for the under-representation of women artists can be found in traditional art history with its emphasis on the hierarchy of genres. As curator Holger Birkholz explains:

“For many years, the hierarchy of genres was central to art history. In this ranking of the aesthetic value of styles of art, history painting was first, while still lifes or simple portraits were at the bottom. We still have the catalogues from the state academy of art from those days. If you look the women artists listed there, you often find they were painting subjects in the lower ranks of the hierarchy of genres.”

There is a tragic story to the painting of this young woman with her sketch pad and pencil. The story was uncovered by Claudia Müller, a provenance researcher at the Albertinum, together with her colleagues:

“For me, the case of the lady with the drawing pad and pencil by Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein is very important, since we could precisely trace the provenance of the work. The painting was acquired in 1940 by the Dresden gallery, then still under Hans Posse –”

Posse, then the Director of the Paintings Gallery, bought the work from a Munich art dealer in 1940. The art dealer’s archive also documented the painting’s previous owner – an art dealer in Vienna.

“So that pointed to a Viennese art dealer involved in the Nazi clearances of homes belonging to Jewish families, or taking this painting from such a clearance to sell it.”

Through further research, the provenance team could trace the painting to Jenny, Malvine and Bertha Rosauer. In the late 1930s, these three elderly sisters from a Jewish family were living together in an apartment in Vienna. In 1938, after Austria’s annexation into the German Reich, the Nazi authorities ordered all Jews in the country to submit a list of all their assets – and the list compiled by the three sisters has survived.

“The list includes the paintings they owned, and under number 59, we found ‘Carl von Vogelstein, Picture of a woman artist with a view of Naples’.

The sisters were driven out of their apartment and into a ghetto house where one of them died; the other two sisters were murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp.

When Hans Posse acquired this painting in 1940 for the Dresden Paintings Gallery, he may well have suspected it had been previously been owned by a Jewish family. After all, Posse knew a lot about what was going on. Not only was he Director of the Dresden Paintings Gallery, but in 1939 he was appointed Special Envoy for Hitler’s planned museum project in Linz.

In the war years, Posse was unable to put Carl von Vogelstein’s painting on display. Like so many of Dresden’s art treasures, it was taken to Weesenstein Palace near Pirna for safe storage. It remained there as a loan well into the 1970s, and was then returned to the Albertinum. In 2011, after the painting’s provenance had been traced, it was restituted to the Rosauer family and was then acquired legally by the museum.