Pietro Antonio Rotari (Verona 1707 - St. Petersburg 1762)

This intimate portrait of a young girl is powerfully captivating. With her head lowered and her face hidden by a shawl, the painting is mysterious and intensely personal, heightened by the proximity of the viewer to the sitter. In a very deliberate act, she screens her face to hide her emotions, which unsettles the viewer by intimating a sense of intrusion. At the same time, however, the inability to read the girl’s face for further clues endows the painting with an even greater air of intrigue. Indeed, it is the near entire absence of identifiable features in the sitter, apart from a fleshy cheek amongst the cloth, which makes the painting so striking. Customary portraiture relies on attention to the facial features of the sitter, particularly the eyes, to convey character and identity. While noticeably absent here, the portrait is still rich in feeling and personality.

The entire form of the composition works to heighten its poignant tone. By filling the picture space with the girl’s profile and placing her against a neutral background, Pietro Antonio Rotari focuses in full on his sitter. Her withdrawn posture clearly demonstrates emotions at work, which are intensified by subtle allusion rather than an explicit display. Soft tones and delicate brushwork also enhance the sense of melancholy and vulnerability. The result is an engaging and powerful study of emotion embodied in the girl of this evocative and sensuous portrait.

Rotari’s artistic career began as a youthful distraction but the obvious talent of his work led to him entering the studio of Antonio Balestra (1666-1740) in Verona. He remained there until he was eighteen, subsequently moving to Venice from 1725-1727 and then to Rome c.1728, where he was a student of Francesco Trevisani (1656-1746) for four years. After a further period of study with Francesco Solimena (1657-1747) in Naples between 1731 and 1734, Rotari moved back to Verona where he set up his own studio and school.

Rotari’s early works were multi-figured altar pieces, which emulated seventeenth-century Roman and Neapolitan works. However, on travelling to Vienna c.1751, Rotari studied the portraits of Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789), whose clean pictorial smoothness impressed itself upon him. Later, Rotari travelled to Dresden and here he embarked on a series of imaginary portraits of figures displaying various emotions, like the present work. Admirably composed and coloured, these works are painted with a great sensitivity of observation.

Rotari is most notable for the vast number of court portraits that he executed on moving to Russia. His reputation preceding him, Rotari was invited to visit by Elizabeth, Empress of Russia (1709-1762), which led to him becoming her court painter, a position which he held until his death. Typically, these portraits placed the sitter against a plain background, simply lit and set in a space of little depth with a porcelain-like finish. Portrait of Countess A. M. Vorontsova is one such example and its soft quality recalls the style of Liotard.

Anna Vorontsova was married to Alexander Stroganov and both came from formidable aristocratic families. Alexander’s father had commissioned Catherine the Great’s favoured architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1700-1771) to build a magnificent palace on the Nevsky Prospect. And Countess Vorontsova’s relative, Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova (born Vorontsova) (1743-1810) was one of the first women in Europe to hold governmental office and one of the Empress Catherine’s closest confidantes. In 1783, she was appointed director of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and the same year founded and became president of the Russian Academy. On account of her education, travel abroad and writings she became a leading figure in the introduction of eighteenth entury Russian culture to the West, while passing on French enlightenment to Russia.

Rotari’s portrait of Countess Vorontsova demonstrates the great affinity that Rotari felt for his subject and his ability to portray them with delicacy and character. Perhaps no more do we see this, however, than in the subtler qualities of the present work – an exquisite painting from a lesser known body of Rotari’s work which exemplifies his expertise as a portrait painter.