Nineteenth-Century Pastel Portraits

Soft, fragile, and ferociously realistic — pastel in the long nineteenth century was a medium of domestic intimacy and public celebrity, deployed by women artists in particular as a way of working quickly without surrendering finish.

Guest curator Elena Romano has selected works by Quentin de La Tour, Vigée Le Brun, Latour, and a large group of little-seen Florentine academicians; a central room pairs these historical works with Romano’s own recent pastel studies.