(Verona 1707–1762 Saint Petersburg)
Portrait of a young woman,
oil on canvas laid down on panel, 45 x 35 cm, framed

The present portrait is one of the paintings of young women which established Rotari’s reputation throughout Europe. The artist executed similar studies of heads for the courts in Dresden, Vienna and St. Petersburg, equally interesting in their sentiment and painterly brilliance.

These works, with their sentimental character, show women of different classes, frequently engaged in mundane activities. 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 ‘testine’ by Rotari. The present work is comparable to the Portrait of young woman in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (see M. Polazzo, Pietro Rotari pittore veronese del settecento (1707–1762), Negrar 1990, p. 108, no. 179).

Pietro Antonio Rotari belonged to an aristocratic family: he first trained in his native city of Verona 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-Etienne 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.