A watercolour of a ballerina, standing to front with her hands raised: with powdered hair in two long curls; wearing a plum-coloured hooped skirt of a chequered pattern.

This drawing belongs to an album of operatic caricatures mainly by Marco Ricci and Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder, an intact album from the library of Joseph Smith. A list of the contents of the Smith album, in Smith's handwriting, lists 'David Fossati...1 caricature' as among the draughtsmen of the caricatures, and on this basis Edward Croft-Murray attributed the present drawing to Davide Antonio Fossati (see Blunt & Croft Murray,Venetian Drawings in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen, pp. 182-3). Zanetti and another Venetian collector, Francesco Algarotti, owned similar albums, with many of the caricatures copied or traced, with identifying inscriptions. Zanetti's album is now in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, and Algarotti's belongs to Albert Gellman and is in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

The present drawing, in watercolour and rather stiff, is quite different in style to the other drawings in the album. A very similar drawing, previously in the Marquis Roi's collection and now in the Museum of Vicenza, apparently shows the same sitter (see Ileana Chiappini di Sorio, 'Rosalba Carriera e i ritratti di Barbara Campanini', in Arte Documento, 20, 2004, pp. 186-189). The Vicenza drawing has an inscription 'La graziosa Barberina sfortunata', identifying the sitter as Barbara Campanini, known as 'Barberina'. Enrico Lucchese has noted that this inscription is in Zanetti's handwriting (Enrico Lucchese, 'Le caricature', in La vita come opera d'arte. Anton Maria Zanetti e le sue collezioni, ed. A. Craievich, exh cat, Venice 2018).

Opera, theatre and performance were an important part of Venetian society and culture, and such caricatures were circulated among friends and collectors for light-hearted amusement. Joseph Smith was a keen opera lover who was married to the English opera singer Catherine Tofts and kept a box at the Teatro San Grisostomo in Venice. He collected operatic caricatures of the singers and performers of the day as well as artists and other well-known characters by Marco Ricci and others, and had them bound into this album. The drawings were shared and circulated among the three collectors and their circle as light-hearted amusement, but the artistic caricature was also a long established practice in Italian art.