Water (The Four Elements)

Pastel, as the museum puts it, is practical in some ways and difficult in others. It was cheaper than oil on canvas, its materials were easy to carry, and it suited portraits perfectly. It also forgives nothing. Once the colour is down it cannot be corrected, and the lightest touch on the surface disturbs the powdered pigment, which has to be held with special fixatives. Rosalba Carriera had been working in pastel for more than 30 years when she drew this head, one of the four elements she finished between 1741 and 1743. The museum notes that the same words fit her technique and her subjects alike, luminous, delicate, light and small. This is Water. The young woman looks down, absorbed, at fish hanging from a kind of fishing line at the lower right of the sheet.