Young Woman with a Fan

This beguiling pastel depicts a girl holding a folded fan. Sumptuously turned out in silk and lace, diamonds and pearls, she smiles enigmatically and returns our gaze with startling directness. The result is not a portrait-not a particular likeness of a specific individual-but an example of Rotari's "testine" or "teste di carrattere": lively little half-length heads, portraying various (mostly feminine) social types: courtiers and country girls, reading, sleeping, laughing, and crying, dressed in Saxon, Polish, and Russian national dress. Rotari produced these testine in volume, most often in oils, though also in pastel. Descended from seventeenth-century Dutch tronie pictures and French Academic têtes d'expression, but endowed by Rotari with a specifically eighteenth-century wit and élan, these pictures brought him a steady stream of royal patronage and have since became virtually synonymous with his name.
Young Woman with a Fan shares the rudiments of its composition with an oil painting in the celebrated Gallery of the Graces, a vast room "paved" with Rotari's teste at Peterhof, the summer palace of the tsars in Saint Petersburg. The pastel very likely predates the oil painting, having been executed at the Dresden court between 1751 and 1756.