Anna Rajecka

Anna Rajecka (Warsaw, c. 1762 – Paris, 1832) was a Polish portrait painter and pastellist active in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sources give varying dates for her birth and death; the record used here lists 1754 and 1830. She was also known as Madame Gault de Saint-Germain, after her marriage to the miniaturist Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain. The daughter of the portrait painter Józef Rajecki, she was taken under the wing of King Stanisław August Poniatowski of Poland, who paid for her education.

In Warsaw she trained with Ludwik Marteau and Marcello Bacciarelli, and in Paris with Jean-Baptiste Greuze; she may also have had lessons from Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Although she later moved in the circle around Jacques-Louis David, she probably never took lessons from him. In 1783 the king financed her enrolment at the Louvre's art school for women. He hoped she would return to Poland as an art teacher, but after her marriage in 1788 she chose to stay in Paris. In 1791 she became the first Polish woman to exhibit at the Salon, and she seems to have received royal support until 1792.

She painted members of the Polish royal court and, in Paris, won commissions from the local aristocracy. The king's agent, Filippo Mazzei, thought she had little talent and was hard to work with. She sent many paintings to Warsaw, but Bacciarelli judged few worthy of the Royal Collection. During the Reign of Terror she fled from Paris to Clermont-Ferrand and may have stopped painting; little is known about this period. After returning to Paris, she is said to have gone blind around 1824.

Her reputation rests mainly on her portraits of the Polish court circle and on her place as one of the first Polish women artists to exhibit at the Paris Salon.