🎀 Portrait of Lydia Schbelsky, Baroness Staël von Holstein

Let’s get something out of the way up front: if tulle had a patron saint, it would be this woman. Portrait of Lydia Schbelsky, Baroness Staël von Holstein is less a painting than a love letter to chiffon, froth, and the Victorian fantasy that women were spun from mist and duty. Here sits Lydia, nobility incarnate, in a dress so diaphanous it might’ve required its own scaffolding. She gazes…