Alexander Roslin

Biography

In 1765 Roslin won a competition for a group portrait of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld and his family, and his rival was Jean-Baptiste Greuze.

He was born on 15 July 1718 in Malmö, the son of a naval physician, Hans Roslin. He learned to draw in Karlskrona under an Admiralty captain, Lars Ehrenbill, and was expected to become a naval draughtsman; he himself began with miniatures. At sixteen he moved to Stockholm to the court painter Georg Engelhard Schröder, and under him began painting large portraits in oils. In 1741 he settled in Gothenburg, and the following year moved to Scania, where until 1745 he painted portraits and church pictures, among them works for the church at Hasslöv.

In 1745 Roslin left Sweden for Bayreuth, at the invitation of the Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach. In 1747 he went to Italy to study the old masters and painted portraits of the nobility there; in 1752 his sitters included the family of the Duke of Parma. In the same year he arrived in Paris.

In Paris he became a protégé of François Boucher, and his work quickly came into fashion. He was admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, to which his wife, the pastellist Marie-Suzanne Giroust, also belonged. They married in 1759 and had three sons and three daughters. His early portraits are painted in bright, cool colours and are close to Jean-Marc Nattier; from the 1760s his colouring became bolder. Examples are “The Lady with the Veil” (1768), a portrait of his wife in Bolognese dress that Denis Diderot called “très piquante”, and the group portrait of the Jennings family (1769). In 1767 he painted a double portrait with his wife: she is working in pastels on a portrait of Henrik Wilhelm Peill, while Roslin points to a gold box given to him by Peill. The frame is inscribed “Loin et près” (“Far away and yet close”). The painting is now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

Roslin painted the French royal family and foreign princes, among them Gustav III with his brothers. From 1753 he exhibited eighteen times at the Paris Salon. In 1771, although a foreigner, he was granted a pension and a free apartment in the Louvre. In 1772 Sweden awarded him the Order of Vasa, and he came to be called “Roslin le Chevalier” (“Roslin the knight”). He signed his works “Roslin Suédois”.

Critics praised his rendering of textures: of satin and skin they said, “Go to Roslin.” To viewers today the faces in his portraits sometimes seem stiff; to my mind the remark is fair for some of his commissioned pieces, but not for all.

After his wife’s death in 1772, Roslin travelled to Sweden in 1774–1775, where he was elected an honorary foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. He painted the Swedish royal family, a self-portrait while painting the king, the statesman Carl Fredrik Scheffer and Carl Linnaeus.

On the way back he visited St. Petersburg and in 1775–1777 painted several portraits of Catherine II and of Russian courtiers, among them Ivan Betskoi, his sister Anastasia Ivanovna, and Ivan Shuvalov. Catherine offered to keep him in her service; he declined and returned to France.

Roslin died in Paris on 5 July 1793, having outlived the Revolution and many of his patrons. By then he was one of the wealthiest artists in the city.