The daughter of French elites, Germaine de Stäel (1766-1817) was a cosmopolitan and influential woman whose exile in Germany brought her into contact with leading German intellectuals. While at the court in Weimar, de Stäel formed close friendships with Goethe, Schiller, and August Schlegel. A passionate intellectual, de Stäel left her native France following the Revolution, and she grew to loathe Napoleon. Her writings – including her feminist novel Delphine (1802) and her cultural study of German Romanticism De l'Allemagne [On Germany] (1813) – added to the fame she enjoyed throughout the European continent. This is a posthumous portrait painted by Marie-Eléonore Godefroid.