The Chocolate Girl

A servant girl walks toward the viewer carrying a lacquered tray: a Meissen porcelain cup of hot chocolate and a glass of clear water. The glass — reflection, refraction, cool light picked up from the room — is a perfect miniature still life painted inside a full-length figure portrait. Liotard worked entirely in pastel on parchment. The Venetian critic Francesco Algarotti saw the painting in 1745 and called it 'the most beautiful pastel that has ever been seen'; he bought it that year for Augustus III of Saxony's collection. The sitter's identity has never been settled — Nandl Baltauf, a Viennese chambermaid said to have married a Habsburg prince, is the leading candidate. Now at Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden @skd.museum