Barbara Rosina Lisiewska-De Gasc

Barbara Rosina Lisiewska was born on 10 July 1713 in Berlin, the daughter of the Prussian court painter Georg (Jerzy) Lisiewski. She trained first under her father and later studied with Antoine Pesne, the leading portraitist at the Prussian court, absorbing his manner of court and society portraiture. No formal academy enrollment or degree is documented for her; her training followed the workshop model common to artist families of the period.

In 1741 she married the Berlin court painter David Matthieu, who was also the widower of her sister Dorothea Elisabeth. Following Matthieu's death in 1755, she continued to paint and was appointed court painter to the Princes of Anhalt-Zerbst in 1757. In 1760 she married Ludwig de Gasc, an assessor at the Berlin court who later taught French literature in Braunschweig, and the professional name Barbara Rosina de Gasc dates from this second marriage. She was admitted to the Confrerie Pictura in The Hague in 1767 and became an honorary member of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1769. She later moved with her husband to Braunschweig, where she was named court painter to the Dukes of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel in 1777. She died on 26 March 1783 in Dresden.

Much of the later literature, including museum catalogues and encyclopedic entries, refers to her as Anna Rosina de Gasc. Specialist sources, including the pastellists.com scholarly dossier and the museum-digital Berlin database, identify Barbara Rosina as her correct given name and describe the "Anna Rosina" form as a longstanding error in the literature. This profile follows the specialist consensus while retaining both name forms as aliases for search and identification purposes.

No exact, attributable critic quotations from named writers in major outlets could be confirmed for this artist. Her standing rests instead on documented scholarly and institutional attention, including individual reattributions by specialists such as Helmut Borsch-Supan, whose work has connected paintings such as a princess portrait to the artist, and on continued museum interest in reconstructing her body of work through provenance and archival research.

The highest confirmed auction price for the artist is EUR 126,000, including buyer's premium, for Allegory of the Sense of Hearing, sold at Lempertz. The lot is recorded on the Lempertz artist index at an estimate of EUR 80,000, and available sources do not confirm the exact calendar date of the sale. Lempertz's artist index also records two other notable results for the artist, a work catalogued as Face (18) at EUR 52,080 and a portrait of Duchess Anna Sophie Charlotte of Sachsen-Eisenach-Jena at EUR 18,150, though exact sale dates for those two results are likewise not confirmed in the available sources. Taken together, the record shows a small, German-auction-house-driven market for the artist's work, concentrated at Lempertz and specialist dealers such as Neumeister and Senger.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for this artist, and her identity has long been confused in the literature between the names Anna Rosina and Barbara Rosina de Gasc, so provenance and museum-catalogue cross-referencing matter more than usual when evaluating a purported work. Her auction market is thin, with only a handful of confirmed public sale results, all through German auction houses, which means any single result should be read with caution rather than as a stable price trend. No current commercial gallery or estate representative could be confirmed for this artist.