A Woman Putting Flowers in Her Hair (c. 1710): Art, History and Details

A Woman Putting Flowers in Her Hair (c. 1710) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Rosalba Carriera (Italian, 1675–1757).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Scholars generally agree that Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757) developed the art of painting miniatures on ivory, in place of the traditional support of vellum, a fine animal skin. Although she became famous as a pastel painter, in her early career, Carriera decorated ivory snuff boxes-containers used to hold powdered tobacco taken by sniffing up the nostrils-for tourists. This miniature likely served as a lid to a snuff box, due to its elliptical shape in contrast to the oval or occasionally round shapes of most other miniatures. Although painters of ivory snuff boxes used watercolor, the same media artists used on vellum, the finished images on ivory were crude in comparison to those painted on vellum because ivory presents a greasy, non-absorbent surface, causing watercolor to run. Carriera revolutionized the art of watercolor painting on ivory through a process she termed her fondelli, or foundation. She developed a way in which to work in watercolor on ivory that emulated the soft powdery sophistication of her pastels. She used opaque gouache, essentially watercolor paint mixed with a gummy white, a combination of media which adhered to the oily surface of ivory. News of Carriera's innovation spread through Europe, and in the first few decades of the 1700s, most miniaturists abandoned vellum in favor of ivory.

Object facts

• Title: A Woman Putting Flowers in Her Hair
• Date: c. 1710
• Creator attribution: Rosalba Carriera (Italian, 1675–1757)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Portrait Miniature
• Technique: watercolor on ivory in a tortoiseshell pique-point frame
• Dimensions: Framed: 10.6 x 12.7 cm (4 3/16 x 5 in.); Unframed: 8.6 x 10.5 cm (3 3/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1940.1203

A detail from the museum

Its extraordinary thickness indicates that this is one of Carriera's earliest experiments painting on ivory.

Collection credit

The Edward B. Greene Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Oberer, Angela, and Rosalba Carriera. Rosalba Carriera. London: Lund Humphries, 2023.
• Gesellschaft der Bilder- und Miniaturenfreunde (Vienna, Austria), and Leo Schidlof. Katalog der Internationalen Miniaturen-Ausstellung in der Albertina, Wien, mai-juni, 1924. Wien: Gesellschaft der Bilder- und Miniaturenfreunde, 1924.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Edward Belden Greene. Portrait Miniatures ; The Edward B. Greene Collection. 1951.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.