Carriera, The Proto-Pastellist

Rosalba Carriera
Self Portrait with The Artist's Sister, 1715

Image courtesy of the

Metropolitan Museum

Rosalba Carriera (1675 - 1757), a lifelong Venetian, became a sought-after portraitist and was the world's first "pastellist".

The actual paste formed from dry pigment and water, and then dried is considered pastel (almost always with binder added to some degree or another). The first mention of this medium was by Leonardo da Vinci in 1495. Some artists used the medium thereafter, such as Quentin de La Tour, but Carriera popularized pastel works in the eighteenth century, and established a large corpus of such.

*Not incidentally, the blessed Scots also invented Whiskey in about the same year.