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Pietro Longhi - Portrait of a Lady - Walters 37395
Summary
This unidentified woman has a cool, confident expression. Her hair is powdered white, and her low-cut dress is decorated with flowers, but she wears no jewels, coquettishly suggesting the innocence of a simple shepherdess fashionably combined with urban sophistication. Though the execution is close to that of Longhi's signed known portraits and introduces the silvery tones which lend a quality of aristocratic detachment to his ladies, there are too few signed portraits of women by him to be certain of the attribution.
Pietro Longhi (1702—1785) was a painter of the Rococo period known for his small scenes of Venetian social and domestic life. He was the son of the silversmith Alessandro Falchi, in whose workshop he received his first education. Later he worked under the direction of the Veronese artist Antonio Balestra, but his only important work of this kind, the monumental ceiling "The Fall of the Giants" (completed in 1734) for Palazzo Sagredo, failed. It is likely that because of this he left Venice for a while and studied in Bologna with the genre painter Giuseppe Maria Crespi.
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