Attributed to Pietro Antonio Rotari (1707 - 1762), Italian painter of the Rococo era. His portraits, mostly of women, are renowned for being beautiful and realistic. The details and skill with which this portrait was painted are admirable. A young noble girl sits in a thoughtful pose, leaning on the back of a chair. She is wearing a riding camisole, light blue with gold embroidered details. The camisole is a little loose, her face is a little flushed... this tells us that the girl is resting after horseback riding. On her we see an expensive pearl set consisting of a necklace and earrings and a gold ring with a sapphire; all the jewelry is very harmoniously combined with her clothes and does not give the impression of pretentious pomposity. There is a coquettish hair clip in her hair in the form of a bouquet of fresh flowers. Antique oil painting on canvas, unsigned, framed, first half of the 18th century.
Size app.: 72.5 x 57 cm (roughly 28.5 x 22.4 in) frame 84.5 x 69.6 cm (roughly 33.3 x 27.4 in). Very good ready to hang condition, well conserved with little number of retouches to minor areas, relined. Please study good resolution images for overall cosmetic condition. In person actual painting may appear darker or brighter than in our pictures, strictly depending on sufficient light in your environment. Weight of app. 3 kg is going to measure some 5 kg packed for shipmed.
Pietro Antonio Rotari was born in Verona, he led a peripatetic career, and died in Saint Petersburg, where he had traveled to paint for the Russian Imperial court. Rotari's was initially a pupil of Antonio Balestra, but moved and lived in Venice from 1725 to 1727. He then joined the studio of Francesco Trevisani in Rome (1728–1732). Between 1731 and 1734, he worked with Francesco Solimena in Naples. He then returned then to Verona, where he started a studio. In 1750, he moved to Vienna. In 1756, he was invited to Russia by the court of the Tsarina Elizabetta Petrovna. From there he moved to Dresden and to work with the court of Augustus III of Poland. He returned to St Petersburg to work with the court of Catherine II. Portrait of King Augustus III of Poland, by Rotari, 1750s. He was much in demand as a portraitist, and painted royal families in Dresden and Saint Petersburg. He also painted the multi-figured altarpieces of the Four Martyrs (1745) for the church of the Ospedale di San Giacomo in Verona. He also painted an altarpiece of San Giorgio tempted to sacricifice to the Idols (1743) for the church of the same name in Reggio-Emilia, and an Annunciation (1738) for the main altar for the church of the Annunziata in Guastalla. After the death of Rotari in 1762, Empress Catherine II bought all the canvases that remained in his studio from the artist's widow for 14,000 rubles. In total, there were about six hundred portraits. Catherine II decided to decorate one of the halls of the Grand Palace in Peterhof with Rotari “girls' heads”. In 1764, according to the project of the architect J. B. Vallin-Delamote, the “trellis” (solid) hanging of paintings in the hall, called the “Cabinet of Fashion and Graces”, was completed. Wallin-Delamote designed the frames and reduced the number of portraits to 368 in the final version.
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