Portrait of a Man

This pastel reached London by way of an archaeologist. Sir Austen Henry Layard had dug up the Assyrian palaces of Nimrud and Nineveh in the 1840s, and in later life he settled in Venice and collected Venetian painting. He bought this portrait in the city in 1880, and it came to the National Gallery with his bequest in 1916, still in its original 18th-century Venetian frame.

The sitter's name is lost. He was probably a Venetian too, since the picture stayed in the city until the late 19th century. Carriera made it in the 1720s, at the height of her career, and kept to a narrow, silvery range. The grey jacket with its embroidered trim, the white cravat and the curled wig tied with a black ribbon almost melt into the background, set apart only by a faint powder-blue glow.