Elisabeth von Nast-Kolb, geb. Hardegg

This is not a cartoon or caricature but an oil portrait: a young fair-haired woman in a deep crimson velvet dress with lace trim arranges pink and cream roses in a glass vase. The inscription A. Romako / a Roma / 1874 anchors it firmly. It belongs to no satirical print tradition — no Hogarthian moral sequence, no Gillray grotesque, no Daumier lithograph, no Nast woodcut. Including it in an exhibition tracing caricature's lineage to the comic strip would be misleading. The work is a refined society portrait, elegant and psychologically alive, but it carries none of the visual rhetoric — distortion, allegory, crowd scenes, speech scrolls — from which the comic page descended.