25 Perhaps Carriera’s most prestigious commission was awarded by Philippe II himself shortly after her arrival in Paris. She was asked to paint a portrait of the then tenyear-old Louis XV, which required the painter to come to court on several occasions. Carriera wrote regular diary entries during her time in Paris, leaving us with detailed reports of these meetings at the royal court. Furthermore, her notes serve to reflect just how successful and hence prolific her time in Paris proved to be. Her paintings met with such acclaim that she was practically swamped with commissions. She took to receiving clients from as early as six in the morning to keep up with the sheer volume of portrait requests, entering into a period of astonishing productivity that ultimately gave rise to some 50 pastel paintings in the space of a little over a year.22 Also of particular significance for the artist during her time in Paris must have been her interactions with fellow artists, including such figures as Nicolas de Largillière, Jean-François de Troy, and the court portraitist Hyacinthe Rigaud.23 According to her diary entries, she also met the pastel painters Jean-Baptiste Massé, Jacques-Antoine Arlaud, and Joseph Vivien.24 She would have doubtlessly found Vivien’s work especially interesting due to the exceptional role his pastel paintings enjoyed in Paris salon exhibitions.25 Meeting Jean-Antoine Watteau prompted Carriera to pay him several subsequent visits, prior eventually to painting his portrait in February 1721 (fig. 3). His fragile health already clear to see in the painting, Watteau eventually died at just 37 years of age shortly after Carriera left Paris.26 Two other illustrious representatives of Parisian cultural life should also be mentioned here: Antoine Coypel and his son Charles-Antoine Coypel. In addition to being one of the most celebrated artists of the French court, bearing the official title Premier peintre du Roy, Antoine Coypel had also served as the director of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture from 1714 andwas a true admirer of Carriera’s art, whose influence even extended into his own work.27 The absolute highpoint of her travels ultimately came in the formof a unique honour: on 26 October 1720, Carriera was admitted to the Académie royale, joining the ranks of perhaps the most prestigious cultural institution in all of Europe, and, moreover, as the first and hitherto only foreign female artist to do so.28 However, as with the academy in Rome years previously, Carriera took her time creating her reception piece. It was only after returning to Venice in spring 1721 that the artist slowly set to work on creating the academy- bound pastel. In order not to stretch the patience of the French too thin, she sent a letter in October 1721 to Paris in which, true to the classical tradition of ekphrasis, she outlined a description of the work.29 The painting was to depict a nymph from Apollo’s retinue (fig. 4). Although part of the official iconography of the French court since the reign of Louis XIV, the sun god’s presence is merely limited to the allusion in the painting’s title. In keeping with a common visual practice in France, Carriera here condenses the retinue to a sole female figure by depicting just one nymph. The subject is reminiscent of a marble figure in the sculptural group Apollo Attended by the Nymphs by François Girardon and Thomas Regnaudin, which Carriera would certainly have had occasion to admire in the gardens of Versailles (fig. 6). At the same time, her nymphs’ pose assumes the form of an ingenious reimagining of Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint John the Baptist (fig. 5) – in other words, the artist managed deftly and judiciously to unite in a single pastel allusions to classical literature, French state iconography, and a paragon of Italian genius.30 The work met with considerable enthusiasm in Paris, and commissions for the Queen of Pastel, as she was now known, continued to flow from France even after her return to Venice. Fig. 3 Rosalba Carriera Portrait of a Gentleman (Jean-Antoine Watteau[?]) 1721 · pastel on paper 55 × 43 cm Treviso, Musei Civici di Treviso
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