A Sleeping Girl

A young woman sleeps with her head tipped against the carved back of her chair, her cheek and parted lips faintly flushed, a black fur cap draped with a red cloth and gold tassel over her brown curls, her blue bodice open over a butter-yellow corset — the whole softened into a blurred, dreamy image by Rotari’s blended strokes. Pietro Rotari, the Venetian painter who ended his career as portraitist to the Russian court, made this and its companion head studies about 1760–1762 in St. Petersburg, where such sentimental girl-types became so prized that Catherine the Great kept them in her private rooms; this one, the provenance records say, was given by the empress to her chancellor Prince Bezborodko. It entered the National Gallery of Art in 1939 with the Samuel H. Kress Collection. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.