Felicita Sartori

Sale, Milan, Sotheby's, 4 June 2003, lot 132;

Swedish Private Collection;

sale, Sweden, Uppsala Auktionskammare, 14 June 2023, lot 617

N. Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, online edition, p. 1, cat. no. J.655.105, reproduced

This grand portrait of a gentlemen in a fur trimmed coat and embroidered shirt is the work of a female pupil of Rosalba Carriera, Felicita Sartori.

Sartori first trained in the house of her uncle, Antonio dall'Agata, a painter and engraver in Gorizia, before moving to Venice around 1728, where she became a pupil of Rosalba, who was at the height of her popularity. Around 1741 Sartori was invited to Dresden by Franz Joseph von Hoffmann, councillor to August III, whom she married the following year. He died in 1749, at which point her movements become unclear and she possibly remarried. She died in Dresden in 1760. 

Her surviving works are apparently all miniatures, mostly drawn after well-known prototypes by Rosalba. It is probable that she learned pastel before specializing in miniatures, and the extent of her work in that medium is unclear; very possibly some of the surviving pastel copies after Rosalba are actually by Felicita Sartori. 

Rosalba seems to have portrayed her pupil in a handsome pastel, Portrait of a lady in a Turkish costume, holding a mask, now in the Uffizi, a replica of which is in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva.¹

1. B. Sani, Rosalba Carriera, Turin 2007, nos. 344-345, pp. 306-307, both reproduced