(Verona 1707–1762 St. Petersburg)
Portrait of a girl in a white headscarf,
oil on canvas, 47.5 x 37.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Enrico Lucchese for confirming the attribution of the present painting and for his help in cataloguing the present lot.

The present work by Pietro Rotari belongs to the celebrated group of ‘Teste di carattere o di fantasia’ [‘imaginary or character portraits’] mentioned by contemporary sources (see L. Nikolenko, Pietro Antonio in Russia and America, in: The Connoisseur, 171, 1969, pp. 192–193).

This type of representation reoccurs in another work by the artist from the same period 1756–62, the ‘Serenità Contadina’ (see M. Polazzo, Pietro Rotari, pittore veronese del Settecento, Verona 1990, p. 105, no. 170) which also shows a peasant girl in similar pose, although her head is slightly inclined. Moreover, the greater frontality of the features in the present work can also be compared well with the Young woman in Russian costume in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome.

Rotari’s production of figures in half-length, especially women, always presenting differing and varied emotive states, is documented from as early as the summer of 1749, when Scipione Maffei of Verona records in his collection a ‘donna piangente’ [‘crying woman’] and another ‘sorridente’ [‘smiling’] (see S. Maffei, Epistolario (1700–1755), ed. by C. Garibotto, II, Milan 1955, p. 1248). It was only later, during his sojourns at the courts of Vienna and Dresden that Rotari began consistently producing this type of paintings, which are stylistically close to the pastels of Rosalba Carriera and Jean-Etienne Liotard which were similarly collected by his aristocratic patrons.

His success in Poland at the court of Augustus III was followed by his call to Saint Petersburg in 1756 by the Russian Empress Elizaveta Petrovna. Some forty paintings left in his studio in Russia were returned to his brother, Paolo in Verona, while another thirty-two canvases were inherited by Catherine II. In 1764 she commissioned 360 ‘character portraits’ for the decoration of the Cabinet of the Muses and Graces at the Peterhof Palace.