Portrait of a Lady as a Vestal Virgin

The Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome were priestesses of the goddess Vesta who tended the sacred eternal flame in the Forum Romanum, took vows of chastity, and enjoyed extraordinary social privileges in exchange for thirty years of service. Dressing a sitter as a Vestal Virgin in eighteenth-century portraiture—as Nattier did here in 1759—implied purity, devotion, and a form of sacred authority that differed from the more common identifications with Diana or Hébé. This late Nattier work, now in the North Carolina Museum of Art, was painted when the artist was in his mid-seventies, and demonstrates the remarkable consistency of his technique and vision across a very long career. The white robes and veil of the Vestal presented technical challenges that Nattier met by modulating tone across near-monochrome passages of fabric. The North Carolina Museum of Art, established in 1947, has built a significant European collection that includes this as a representative example of French Rococo portraiture.

The white vestal robes occupy the largest area of the composition and demand sophisticated handling to avoid flatness. Nattier achieves depth through subtle cool-to-warm tonal shifts across the fabric, using the direction of light to describe the robes' fall without resorting to obvious shadow.