A Lady Working

Niccolò Livaditti came from Trieste and settled around 1830 in Iași, then the capital of the principality of Moldavia, where within a few years he had become the favourite portrait painter of the boyar families. This is a Biedermeier portrait in the full sense: a lady seated at her needlework, rendered with careful attention to the fabrics, the sheen of her dress and the small objects around her, with a landscape opening behind. That taste for domestic detail and quiet respectability was the fashion of the 1840s and 1850s across central Europe, and Livaditti brought it to a Moldavia that was only then modernising its painting. He worked not only in Iași but for clients in Botoșani, Dorohoi and other towns, and he stayed in the region until his death in 1858.