Bianca Constantine, the heroine of TO ALL THE EARLS I’VE LOVED BEFORE, is an aspiring artist. And I wondered how realistic this was, for a young woman in the early nineteenth century. I’d heard of Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun and Angelica Kaufmann, but both of these female artists were trained by their fathers and grew up in artistic circles. I worried if it was even possible for a young woman to learn how to paint, and to make a success of it, if she had no family connections to help her. She certainly couldn’t undergo formal public training, as young men could.
But then I discovered Rosalba Carriera. I have to confess I’d never heard of her before I started my research. But she was a fantastic discovery for my purposes. She came from eighteenth-century Venice, spending mu
ch of her life in Dorsoduro, and my book is partly set there some years later. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a highly skilled embroiderer and lacemaker (I absolutely love the idea of the important influence on her art being her mother, for a change). Nobody knows exactly how she developed her skills, but from decorating snuffboxes she moved to portrait pastels and miniatures. By the time she was 30, she was travelling across Europe, feted at courts, painting kings, queens and princes. She was enormously influential, both in terms of her painting style – the Rococo, which she helped to create and to popularise - and in the techniques and materials she created. Yes – not just an artist, but an inventor and innovator too. I’m embarrassed that I’d never heard of her or seen any of her works until very recently. Because, apart from anything else, they’re beautiful – especially her women, dark-eyed, confident, faintly smiling, knowing things we can only guess at. And her older self-portraits – honest in a way that still challenges a modern viewer.
We don’t know much about her personal life. She lived till her 80s, but was 
blind for many years, possibly partly because of the strain of the lacework and miniature painting. She was absolutely devoted to her sister, and devastated by her death. Unless she was very discreet, it doesn’t seem likely that she was able to combine personal and sexual fulfilment with what was undoubtedly a very successful artistic career by anyone’s standards. Male artists have always had it easier in that respect.
But that’s the beauty of writing fiction.
I can set that right.
Click here for your copy of Emma Orchard's To All The Earls I've Loved Before
About the book:
Newly wealthy artist Bianca Constantine has no intention of marrying – until a portrait commission brings her face to face with Xan Challender, the man who broke her heart in Venice.
Now he’s an earl, she’s an heiress, and the secrets that tore them apart are about to resurface. But so is the passion neither of them has forgotten. An unmissable steamy, second chance romance if you love Bridgerton, Eloisa James and Sophie Irwin.