Rosalba Carriera’s Man in Pilgrim’s Costume

Little is known about this portrait, painted in about 1730. Despite the fragility of the medium—pastel—it is in pristine condition. The portrayal of the man as a pilgrim, with a black cape and holding a staff, may indicate that he was a member of the Pellegrini family—pellegrini being the Italian word for pilgrims—or that he is someone who travelled on a pilgrimage. More likely, however, his attire is simply a costume related to the Venetian Carnival.

This pastel is one of a small number of works of art at the Frick by a female artist. Rosalba Carriera (Italian, 1673–1757) spent most of her life in Venice, then a popular destination for young aristocrats from all over Europe undertaking the Grand Tour—a tour of the continent that served as an educational rite of passage into adulthood. Many of these travellers would go to Rosalba’s studio to have a portrait painted, and Rosalba, who began her career as a miniaturist painter, became internationally acclaimed. Her pastels are technically innovative, remarkable for their soft edges and sumptuous effects. By binding coloured chalk into sticks, she obtained a much wider range of prepared colours, which ultimately expanded the visual possibilities of this medium.

Nicolas Party is well known for his pastels, and in the summer of 2023 the Frick debuted a site-specific pastel mural created by him in response to the Rosalba portrait in the Italian Galleries at the museum’s temporary home, Frick Madison. Images of the installation are featured in this volume.

Designed to foster critical engagement and to interest specialist and non-specialist alike, each book in the Frick Diptych series illuminates a single work in the Frick’s rich collection with an essay by a Frick curator paired with a contribution from a contemporary artist or writer.

Author biographies

Born in Lausanne in 1980, Nicolas Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st-century, and one that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade.

Xavier F. Salomon is deputy director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, The Frick Collection, New York.

Table of Contents

• Director’s Foreword by Ian Wardropper
• Acknowledgments
• Mask of Dust by Nicolas Party
• Rosalba’s Man in Pilgrim’s Costume by Xavier F. Salomon
• Bibliography
• Index
• Image Credits