Rosalba Carriera

Lady Figuring as Embroideress (Self-Portrait?)

This miniature, assumed to be a self-portrait, shows the sitter with embroidery. A young girl approaches from behind and offers her a basket full of flowers. Carriera's mother was a professional embroideress and the artist herself was brought up in her mother's workshop - a fact which probably encouraged the woman painter to present herself here as an embroideress. Due to the restriction of the palette on grey, pink and blue for dresses and incarnate, both women seem to be extremely frail; moreover, it makes the blue colour of the dress shine especially bright. By using few white and dark grey strokes, the artist manages to reproduce very unobtrusively the game of light and shadow, thus drawing the spectator's attention to the alert expression of the embroideress' face as well as to the cautious approach of the young girl.

¹ Die "reduzierte Palette" kann auch durch Bleichung lichtempfindlicher Pigmente entstanden sein, wie dies in anderen Werken Carrieras nachgewiesen wurde.