Italian portraitist Pietro Rotari arrived in St. Petersburg sometime after 1756 at the invitation of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna to serve as a court painter. His tenure in Russia proved extraordinarily productive: he executed numerous ceremonial portraits and, most notably, a celebrated series of “character heads” — intimate small-scale depictions of young men and women dressed in traditional Russian costumes. The Empress herself acquired fifty of these works.
The chest-length portrait on display, painted by Rotari, depicts Empress Elizabeth in a black lace mantilla adorned with two roses. Rotari softened her features and subtly idealized her appearance, presenting her with a youthful grace that transcended her actual age. In 1761, the engraver Yevgraf Petrovich Chemesov created a print based on this painting. By that time, Chemesov, once a pupil of Georg Friedrich Schmidt, had matured as an independent artist.
Chemesov executed the engraving in a mixed technique. He began with etching, meticulously modeling volume through a network of parallel and cross-hatched lines. Subtle transitions between light and shadow are rendered with delicate stippling and fine lines that vary in length, direction, and depth. The final detailing was achieved using drypoint, whose characteristic burr is especially evident in the contours of the Empress’s face and décolletage. Chemesov masterfully sculpts the facial features of the Empress. The black lace of the mantilla is rendered with extraordinary precision. The neutral, unobtrusive background heightens the three-dimensionality of the figure, focusing attention on the sitter’s poise and presence.
Remarkably, Rotari’s original oil painting remained unfinished, essentially at the underpainting stage. Only the face had been fully developed; the costume and background were loosely sketched in. Yet Chemesov transformed this incomplete model into a masterpiece of graphic art. This impression, held in the collection of the Irbit Museum of Fine Arts, is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of Russian 18th-century engraving.
In 1762, at the age of twenty-four, Chemesov was awarded the title of Academician by the Imperial Academy of Arts specifically for this work. Like much of his oeuvre, this portrait belongs to the genre of intimate engraving. This style is characterized by the absence of elaborate settings, minimal background elements, and a concentrated focus on the inner world of the subject.
