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Vigée Le Brun’s father was a pastelist, though not an especially successful one.

This metaphysical tradition gets picked up today by the Portuguese-British pastelist Paula Rego, who emerges as a star of this Biennale with an entire gallery of her fraught scenes of domestic violence, where love and fear make humans act like dogs.

Only seven years before, the Italian pastelist Rosalba Carriera had visited Paris and found duchesses and princesses imploring her to do their portraits.

My greatest sorrow was that I had lost a magnificent portrait of my mother by Bassompierre Severin, a pastelist very much à la mode under the Empire; an oil portrait of my father, and a very pretty pastel of my sister Jeanne.