Rosalba Carriera

Rosalba Carriera turned pastel, until then thought of as a minor medium for sketches, into a fashionable art for finished portraits, and became one of the most celebrated painters in Europe as a woman working in a field almost entirely male. Her chalk portraits are soft, silvery, and flattering, catching the powdered, light-filled look the age wanted of itself.

In 1720 she travelled to Paris and caused a sensation. The regent's court and the whole fashionable city sat for her, the banker Pierre Crozat hosted her, and the French Academy made her a member. She did the same in Venice, Vienna, and beyond, working faster and cheaper than an oil painter and never short of sitters.

She helped set off the Rococo taste for delicate, intimate portraiture that ran through the century. Her last years were dark in the plainest sense, as her eyesight failed and she went blind, unable to work, in the Venice where she had started.