(Verona 1707–1762 Saint Petersburg)
Portrait of a young lady with a black lace choker,
oil on canvas, 41 x 33 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, Rome

We are grateful to Bernard Aikema for confirming the attribution after examination of the present painting in the original.

The present, unpublished, painting belongs among the celebrated representations of young women that assured the painter from Verona, Pietro Antonio Rotari, was celebrated throughout Europe. Another version of the present painting was sold at Sotheby’s, New York, 18 October 2000, lot 197.

The painter’s reputation was principally asserted thanks to his testine [small heads], which he himself called passioni showing women of different classes, frequently engaged in mundane activities. These works especially attracted the public with their sentimental character, as well as for the great pictorial quality demonstrated in them by the artist. It was above all during his residency in Saint Petersburg that Rotari devoted himself to this type of representation. Indeed, even today, the Painting Hall of the Peterhof, Zarina Elisabeth’s summer residence, is covered with hundreds of testine among which is the portrait of a lady that is very similar to the painting under discussion here (see: M. Polazzo, Pietro Rotari pittore veronese del settecento (1707–1762), Negrar 1990, p. 107, no. 177).

The present work depicts a young woman with a sensual and independent gaze that projects a subtly erotic undercurrent, her expression is rendered still more intense by the delicately soft quality of the painter’s brushstrokes.

Pietro Antonio Rotari belonged to an aristocratic family: he first trained in his native city under the guidance of Antonio Balestra, before undertaking formative journeys to Venice and Rome where he studied with Francesco Trevisani. During the early 1730s he was in Naples where he entered the studio of Francesco Solimena before finally returning to Verona, where he pursued an independent career, transforming all his previous experience into a pictorial language of his own.

In 1749 Rotari travelled to Vienna where he met Jean-Etiénne Liotard, whose polished and brightly toned style of painting must have significantly influenced his future production. Subsequently he was in Dresden at the court of Frederick Augustus III. This sojourn increased his fame to such an extent that it opened the door to Russia for him, and from 1756 he became court painter there, achieving great acclaim particularly as a portraitist.