Girl with bare bosom with Domino mask under courtain

This early Nattier canvas dated 1710, now in the Munich Central Collecting Point records, depicts a girl with a bare bosom holding a domino mask beneath a curtain — a subject in the tradition of masked carnival portraiture that combined titillating ambiguity with the theatrical pleasures of disguise. The domino mask was associated with Venice's carnival and the masked balls of the Paris Opéra, and images of women holding or wearing such masks played on the tension between concealment and revelation. For a twenty-five-year-old Nattier working in 1710, this type of subject offered technical challenge and fashionable content alongside the strictly formal portraiture that would define his career. The Munich Central Collecting Point provenance raises the same questions of wartime displacement that attend many European works with that institutional record.

Masked and partially veiled subjects gave painters of this era the opportunity to demonstrate the rendering of different materials simultaneously: the soft skin of the figure, the hard painted surface of the mask, and the gauzy fabric of any veil or curtain in the background. The interplay of these textures was a recognised test of technical range.