Elderly Lady

Most of the faces Rosalba Carriera is remembered for are young, powdered and lightly flattered, the look her fashionable clients wanted kept. This sitter is an old woman, and the pastel does not soften her age. Her name has not come down to us. What survives is the record of a real, lined face, made around 1740, when Rosalba was in her sixties herself and near the height of a reputation that reached across Europe. Pastel suited this kind of close, unhurried study, worked dry straight onto the paper so skin and cloth keep a soft, powdery surface. Among the group of her chalk portraits the Accademia in Venice still keeps, this unnamed older woman sits alongside the courtiers and young beauties who were her usual trade.