Gentleman in Blue Coat

The gentleman in the damask-like patterned blue coat may have been portrayed around 1720, judging from the cut of his wig. He adopts a pose which is quite frequent in Rosalba Carriera’s works.¹ His body is turned to the left, his head to the right, and his look is directed towards the miniature’s observer. This popular posture in rococo portrayal gives a dynamic vibrancy to the portrait.
Today the grey and blue shades of the colouring are a distinctive feature of Carriera’s miniatures, though not as an expression of her painting style but resulting from the bleaching of unstable colours. The paintress employed several tints extracted from plants for her painting. Admittedly they are not traceable in her miniatures today, yet they are well-established through her notes in which she describes the plants used and their preparation to obtain paints.² Besides the well-known dye woods, for example, logwood and fernambuk, also poppy, elder, gilly flower, blackberry, iris, gladiolus, violet,dyer’s weed and rose are listed as sources of various tints. These plant extracts are very sensitive to light and therefore generally faded in Carriera’s works. Even if inferences as to the original appearance of the artist’s works are hypothetical, this portrait of a gentleman shows a loss of yellow,orange and red colours. The bright blue is probably of an inorganic nature and was therefore much more resistant to bleaching by light.
B. P.