A young woman, half turned to the right, coquettishly smiles at the spectator. She wears a white lace bodice and apron over a blue satin skirt, and holds a fan in her right hand. A cluster of poppies can be seen in the foreground. The woman appears to be lit from within as she herself acts as the sole light source in the painting.

The model for this painting is Vittoria Caldoni, the daughter of a winemaker from Albano, Italy. In her teenage years she became known throughout Europe as an embodiment of the ideal of Italian beauty and posed for the most famous painters of the 1820s and 1830s then living in Rome; she sat to Riedel, Horace Vernet, Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Ludwig Catel, Heinrich Maria von Hess, and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. She also served as a model for sculptors such as Bertel Thorvaldsen, and Johann Gottfried Schadow. She was the subject of some fifty works, including drawings, paintings and sculptures. In 1839 she married the Russian painter Grigory Lapcenko, who had painted her in 1831, and remained with him for the rest of her life, accompanying him on travels in the Russian Empire.

The title of this painting, literally the 'Assumption of Albano', presumably means 'girl from Albano, beautiful as a Virgin of the Assumption'.  An engraving of this picture by L Stocks, was published alongside a section of letterpress in the 1857 Art Journal. The title, which was given as 'Beauty of Albano' was considered a misnomer by the critic who commended that the lady in question was more English-looking than Italian: 'the picture might be a portrait of one of the aristocratic beauties who shed a brilliancy over the court of Queen Victoria' (p. 356). A version of this painting, Young lady holding a fan, was included in the sale of nineteenth-century Continental School paintings at Sotheby's, New York, on 20 July 1994.

August Heinrich Riedel (1802-1883) was predominantly a painter of portraits, genre works and historical subjects. A student of the Munich Academy, Riedel visited France, Germany, Belgium and Italy but it was in Rome that he became a Member and Professor of the Academia di S Luca.