The Chocolate Girl

In February 1745 a young Venetian writer, Count Francesco Algarotti, was buying art in Venice for Augustus the Third, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, who collected pastels for his gallery in Dresden. On the 3rd of that month Liotard signed a receipt for 120 gold sequins, a very high price for a pastel, and this sheet, probably made in Vienna shortly before, went north. The girl is a chambermaid whom no one has securely named. Six years later Algarotti described the picture to the Paris collector Pierre-Jean Mariette. It was painted almost without shadows, he wrote, lit by two windows reflected in the glass of water, a Holbein in pastel. The windows are there, small panes caught in the curve of the glass, and through the water you can make out her thumb. The shadows are not entirely gone, though. A faint grey one falls on the wall and floor behind her. And just below her knees two thin lines cross the whole sheet, the seam where two pieces of parchment were joined.