Enfilade

A Santini prayer found in Rosalba Carriera’s Portrait of a Tyrolese Lady helped identify the piece as an original by the artist (Photo from Tatton Park and the National Trust). For more information on these paper prayers, see the catalogue for the recent exhibition in Dresden, Rosalba Carriera: Perfection in Pastel.

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As reported recently by a few media outlets, including ArtNet:

Sarah Cascone, “A Frick Curator Has Just Identified Rosalba Carriera as the Artist Behind an Unknown Portrait Languishing in Storage for Decades,” ArtNet (16 October 2023). A Roman Catholic prayer card slipped between the portrait and its frame offered proof that this was an original Carriera.

For 35 years, a delicate pastel portrait languished in storage at Tatton Park, a historic estate in Knutsford, Cheshire, in the UK. Then came a call from a curator in New York, asking to take a look. The work, it turned out, was by Rosalba Carriera, the renowned Venetian Rococo painter and pastelist, and one of art history’s most successful women artists.

Rosalba Carriera, Portrait of a Tyrolese Lady, pastel (Tatton Park and the National Trust).

The rediscovery came courtesy of Xavier Salomon, curator and deputy director at New York’s Frick Collection, who became interested in the Italian artist after the museum received a donation of two of her works in 2020.

“The more I started working on her, I realized there was a need for a new catalogue raisonné and biography,” Salomon said in a phone interview. “It’s going to take many years because she has hundreds of pastels all around the world, and I am just trying to see every single one of them.”

To date, the curator has looked at more than 200 Carriera pastels—but he’s also seen plenty, that while attributed to the artist, were actually copies by other artists. Tatton Park was just one of five homes in the UK’s National Trust Salomon had on his itinerary, one of which had a suite of five that turned out to be the work of British artists. But he was hopeful about Tatton Park, which, according to the National Trust’s inventory, had owned the Portrait of a Tyrolese Lady, identified as the work of Carriera, since the 18th century. . .

The full article is available here»