- Artist
- Pietro Longhi
- Year
- late 1740s
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 73.7 × 64.1 × 12.7 cm (29 × 25 1/4 × 5 in.); Framed: 74 × 64.8 × 9.6 cm (29 1/8 × 25 1/2 × 3 3/4 in.)
Pietro Longhi made his name in mid-eighteenth-century Venice not with the pageantry of Canaletto’s views but with quiet glimpses of daily life, painted in the gentle, anecdotal manner that earned him the nickname of the Venetian Hogarth. In this oil of the late 1740s a lady of the patriciate is seated at her dressing table, caught in the unhurried ritual of her toilette under the soft interior light of a high-ceilinged room. The picture’s calm domestic tone and delicate tonality record the polite world the painter observed with an affectionately satiric eye. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.