Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Rosalba Carriera
Venice 1673 - 1757
7
Portrait of a Young Gentleman, a member of the Wade family
Pastel on paper, laid on to a stretcher.
56 x 42 cm (22 x 16 ½ in.)
Provenance: By descent through the Wade family,
probably commissioned by The Rt. Hon. Field Marshall
Sir George Wade (1673-1748).
Literature: Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists
before 1800, online edition, constantly updated:
www.pastellists.com/Articles/Carriera/1a.pdf
Rosalba Carriera began her career as a painter of
miniatures for snuffboxes. She is thought to have been
inspired to use pastels by the works of Benedetto Luti
and requested pastels to be sent to her from Rome
and from Paris. Rosalba, with well-deserved rapidity
became exceptionally famous and influential for her
exquisite use of the pastel medium and as her fame
grew, prominent figures clamoured to sit for her. Her
success only ended with an encroaching blindness
which developed when she was in her sixties. Her
earliest recorded pastel portrait is of Antonio Zanetti
and dates from around 1700. In 1708 she was
accepted into the Academy of St. Luke in Rome as
pittrice e miniatrice veneziana. In around 1710,
Rosalba made the acquaintance of the connoisseur
collectors Pierre Crozat and Pierre-Jean Mariette and
in 1721 Rosalba was invited to Paris; her portrait
of the painter Antoine Watteau is now well-known
but she was then most celebrated for her series of
pastels of French royalty and nobility which resulted
in her election to the French Academy of Art. She
also visited and worked in Modena, Parma and at the
courts of Vienna and Poland. When she settled again
in Venice her studio became immensely popular
with foreign visitors to the city, and particularly with
the English, to the extent that she described herself
as being attaquée par des Anglais. Her technique
with its vaporous evocation of texture is at once
naturalistic and highly stylised; her early training
probably helped her minutely observed depictions of
cloth and lace and the charm and limpidity of her
likenesses became the essence of 18 th century grace
and civility.
Recently rediscovered, this beautiful pastel has been
in the Wade family since the 18 th century. It can be
presumed to be a portrait of one the natural sons
of the Right Honourable Field Marshall Sir George
Wade, an eminent and wealthy man who had a long
and distinguished army career. He was cultured and
well connected in the London worlds of art and music.
Field Marshall Wade commissioned Burlington to
design his London house and is known to have owned
a huge cartoon by Rubens of Meleager and Atlanta
which was sold to Sir Robert Walpole and went to
Houghton Hall. On his retirement, he was elected
parliamentary representative for the city of Bath and on
moving permanently to London he became governor
of the Royal Academy of Music. Though unmarried,
he had a number of children and in his will of 1747 he
bequeathed the greatest part of his estate to two sons,
at that time also active in the army: Captain John Wade
(1720-1799) and his brother Captain George Wade
(1721-1799); on his death they also became executors
responsible for his properties and art collection 1 . Given
their proximity in age, this pastel could represent either
one of these sons and given also the youthfulness of
the sitter and the elegant dress it is most probable that
the sitter had not yet started his military career. Field
Marshall Wade’s interest in art and music may have led
him to send his sons on a Grand Tour and this work is
very much in keeping with the portraits commissioned
from Rosalba with such enthusiasm by Englishmen in
Venice, such as the portrait of Viscount Edward Coke at
Holkham Hall 2 and that of William Cavendish, Duke of
Devonshire 3 . The most likely dating for the present work
is the mid to late 1730s.
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