Lady in a White Dress with Red Cape

It is fair to assume that this enamel portrait was painted by Jean André Rouquet (1701-1758), as it bears a close resemblance to his London portraits, visible both in the detached and prosaic style of representation and in the sitter’s posture.¹ The colour palette, which is reduced to red and blue shades, gives the lady a reservedness which is found in many English portraits of the period.
Rouquet came from a Protestant family that had emigrated from France to Switzerland. In about 1725 he moved from Geneva to London, where he was very successful on account of his expressively and delicately painted enamel portraits. In about 1750 he moved to Paris, where he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts and was even granted a studio in the Louvre. Because of a mental illness he was admitted to an asylum, where he died in 1758.
The difficulties of enamel painting were that the colours changed during the firing process and that not all the colours needed or indeed tolerated the same temperature. A treatise from 1765 says that the painter in enamel actually has to paint with two colour palettes: a real one and an imaginary one.²
B. P.