Lot 2106 Dα

The portraitist Balthasar Denner, born in Altona, worked for numerous European courts, including those of London and Copenhagen, but in between these sojourns he returned repeatedly to the city of Hamburg, close to his home town, and it was here that the present portrait of an unknown lady, dated 1740, is thought to have been made. In the same year, he also created two life-size portraits of the later Russian Tsar Peter III. In his portraits, Denner combines the finely painted, sometimes porcelain-like rendering in the tradition of the Leiden painter Gerrit Dou with the delicate colour palette of the Rococo.