Mainstream artists started to use pastels in preparatory work and sketches, here Charles Antoine Coypel’s dramatic portrait of Medea (c 1715).

One of the most brilliant of this first wave of pastellists was Rosalba Carriera, whose work demonstrated that a good pastel painter could match the accomplishments of the best oil painters of the day.

In the fingers of a skilled pastellist, materials which had long been tricky to render in oils, like hair and fur, become strengths. Carriera’s superb Self-Portrait as ‘Winter’ from 1730-31 is a fine example.

Carriera’s supreme skill with pastels brought even royalty round to have their portraits painted in the new medium: here Crown Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony (1722-1763), whom she painted in 1739-40.

Pastels were quickly deemed an acceptable medium for women painters too, so that they didn’t then have to contend with the mess and fuss of oil paints, solvents, and cleaning. Most important of all, their hands and clothes weren’t stained by their paints. Pastels are dusty, and these days there are sufficient concerns about the inhalation of toxic pigments in pastel dust as to bring some artists to work in protective masks.