Rosalba Carriera  was born in Chioggia near Venice on October 7, 1675. 
As a child, she began her artistic career by making lace-patterns for her mother.  As snuff-taking became popular, Rosalba began painting miniatures for the lids of snuffboxes and was the first painter to use ivory instead of vellum for this purpose.   She decorated snuffboxes with amorous subjects and from 1698 became a much admired miniaturist. This work evolved into portrait-painting for which she pioneered the exclusive use of pastel.

After painting a pastel portrait of the printmaker Antonio Maria Zanetti, for which she achieved considerable fame, Carriera received commissions from England's influential ambassador in Venice, Christian Cole, first Duke of Manchester. Carriera was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1705.

She devoted herself to pastel potraits from 1708 on, a fashion she launched in France following her stay in Paris from April 1720 to March 1721.

On January 31, 1722  this pastel was officially accepted by acclamation at the Académie council sitting of February 28, 1722.

The article published in the Mercure de France by Mariette, Crozat, and the Abbé de Maroulle describes her work:

It encapsulates all parts of painting, in terms of the color as well as the delicacy of touch; it contains all the graces and ornaments to which a half-figure may lay claim.

Mariette was a faithful admirer of the artist,

I find that in the airs of her heads [of women], Miss Rosalba puts much of the manner of Pietro Liberi; they are often the same characters and have the same shapes of mouth especially, with the difference that Rosalba's heads are much better colored than those of Liberi, and they have more freshness and  truth about them. Their fine color masks their imperfections for, it must be said, Rosalba is quite imperfect, but the same can be said of her as of Correggio: her imperfections aim high and may I believe be allowed her.

While the guest of French banker Pierre Crozat in Paris, she created portraits of Louis XV as a child and other members of the French aristocracy.

 

While there, she developed a friendship with Antoine Watteau, whose potrait she painted twice.   King George III collected her works and Frederick-Augustus II, Elector of Saxony, filled a room in his Dresden palace with more than one hundred of her pastels.

She never married.

In later life Carriera made a long journey to the court of the Poland.

She returned to venice and all the nobles of Europe flocked to her studio.

 




















She outlived all her family and fell blind possibly from her work in miniatures.  
















She endured two unsuccessful cataract operations and  spent her last years in a little house in Dorsoduro, Venice where she died on Friday  April 15, 1757.