Oil on panel. This painting shows a well dressed Victorian woman skating on ice, probably in one of the parks of Paris, where the artist lived. She wears a long coat, which has been blown back to reveal a striking yellow and dark blue dress. Her head is protected by a bonnet, tied with a pink ribbon and her hands are kept warm by a fur muff. A thick winter fog hangs in the air, obscuring our view of other skaters in the background.
The prolific artist, Ludovico Marchetti, was a born in Rome in 1853. In the early 1870s he studied in the studio of the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny y Marsal (1838-1874), also based in Rome. At 25, he moved to France and began to exhibit at the Paris Salon (winning the bronze medal in 1889) and in the Salons of Munich and Berlin. Marchetti specialised in history and period genre subjects, most frequently painting scenes from the 16th to the 18th centuries. He worked in both oil paint and watercolour and produced several illustrations for the French weekly news publication L'Illustration.
