Francesca Thyssen is the daughter of the art collector, the late Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, and the Scottish model, Fiona Campbell-Walter. In 1993 she married Archduke Karl von Habsburg, but they later separated. Francesca von Habsburg (as she is now called) lives in Vienna and, like her father, collects art on a grand scale. Mapplethorpe portrays her in a costume that makes her look like a woman in an early Netherlandish painting or a figure out of the Arabian Nights.
[excerpted from Tate website: www.tate.org.uk]
During his lifetime, Mapplethorpe participated in Documenta 6 in 1977, and the Whitney Museum of American Art held his first major American museum retrospective in 1988, a year before his death. In 2016, exhibitions of his work were held simultaneously at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Museum.
