97 Chocolate Girl had effected a kind of stylistic shift, rendering all previous pastels out of date, including her own:13 With just one accession, one living artist could suddenly make the art of his contemporaries appear old. Regarding the impulse behind installing the Pastel Cabinet in the mews, the Venetian Pietro Maria Guarienti seems a likely candidate. He had already been significantly involved in the purchase of the ducal collection inModena in 1745/46, and was ultimately appointed to the post of surveyor of the elector’s pictures. During his time, he arranged the new presentation of Italian oil paintings in the inner galleries of the converted stables building.14 Following the inauguration of the picture gallery in 1746, the Pastel Cabinet must have been rehung a number of times in order to integrate subsequent acquisitions of works by Carriera into the hanging scheme. Here, there are no available primary sources: the two first editions of the gallery catalogue, compiled by Johann Anton Riedel and Christian Friedrich Wenzel, appeared only years later, in 1765 and 1771. Moreover, they list the exhibited works by artist, making it impossible to localise their respective positions on the walls.15 This situation changes progressively with the catalogues that appeared regularly beginning in 1801, which list the pastels in groups according to the hanging scheme, although their positioning still cannot be reconstructed with precision.16 During the 19th century, and despite the dominant status enjoyed by Carriera’s works, Liotard’s Chocolate Girl became the favourite of many visitors, its elaborately detailed frame, too, helping to set it off from the mass of society portraits, which collectively made an almost uniform impression (fig. 3).17 There were no concrete precedents for the Pastel Cabinet, nor did it become a model for subsequent collections or museums. In Dresden, the art collection of the Saxon Prime Minister Count Heinrich von Brühl was oriented towards the electoral-royal collection, while however ranking below it.18 Brühl’s study, at least, is said to have been decorated with enamel and pastel paintings.19 It was also reported that the Dresden landscape painter Johann Alexander Thiele produced an entire Pastel Cabinet for Brühl: although no works by him in this medium are documented, it was said that “some regarded him as the most eminent German artist when it came to landscapes executed in pastels.”20 Evidently, Brühl owned no pictures by Rosalba Carriera.21 For the pastels, the relocation in 1855 of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie to the Semper Building, an extension of the Zwinger, meant a progressive diminishment of its formerly splendid presentation. This was accompanied by an increasingly negative valuation of the art of the Rococo – and not just in Dresden. The pastels were now accommodated in two ground-floor rooms facing Theaterplatz to the north.22 Adjoining them was a cabinet devoted to works by ChristianWilhelmErnst Dietrich and four rooms reserved for pictures by Antonio Canaletto and Bernardo Bellotto. According to the gallery inventory, which appeared in 1856 after completion of the new installation in the Zwinger, altogether 178 pastels were on view.23 In 1889, when Anton Raphael Mengs’s collection of plaster casts was relocated to the Albertinum from the east hall of the Semper Building’s ground floor, these “new galleries were devoted entirely to the 18th century, so that for the first time, these paintings, so important for the history of art in Dresden, were united to form a cohesive ensemble.”24 The pastels, too, were integrated into this hanging scheme, and were displayed together with the miniatures, initially in a cabinet located in the northwest part of the building, and later in the circular connecting room between the Semper Building and the Zwinger.25 Fig. 3 Jean-Étienne Liotard Chocolate Girl c. 1744 · pastel on parchment Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, gal. no. P 161
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