Marie-Suzanne Roslin

Marie-Suzanne Giroust was born in Paris on 9 March 1734, the daughter of Barthélemy Giroust, jeweller to the king's wardrobe, and Marie-Suzanne Le Roy. She was orphaned relatively early in life. She trained as a pastellist under Maurice Quentin de La Tour and later studied the fundamentals of painting in the studio of Joseph-Marie Vien.

On 8 January 1759, after several years of family opposition, she married the Swedish portraitist Alexander Roslin, who had settled in Paris. The couple had six children, of whom two daughters and two sons survived to adulthood. She continued to work as a pastellist alongside her husband's more prominent painting career and became known in Paris as Madame Roslin.

With Alexander Roslin's support, she was received into the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture on 1 September 1770, presenting as her reception piece a pastel portrait of the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, now in the Louvre. She exhibited that portrait, along with other pastels, at the Salon de 1771 in Paris, where it was shown under catalogue number 150 and drew praise from Denis Diderot and the abbé Lemonnier.

Roslin died in Paris on 31 August 1772, of breast cancer, at the age of 38. Her death closed out a public career that had spanned roughly a decade of exhibition and academy membership.

Roslin's contemporaries recognized her quickly. An anonymous notice in La Feuille nécessaire, published in April 1759, praised the freshness and truthfulness of color in her early pastels and her skill at capturing likeness and skin tone. Her reputation peaked with the Pigalle portrait: reviewing the Salon de 1771, Denis Diderot wrote that it was "a good portrait, a good likeness, and to the honor of Madame Roslin; the colors are beautiful and vigorous," and the Mercure de France singled out her color, drawing, and technical touch as rivaling the oil painters of her day. Writing more than a century later, the critic O. Fidière reflected on her unfulfilled promise, judging that had she lived, Madame Roslin would have made an honorable place for herself in the French school.

Roslin's market is exceptionally thin. Her documented body of work amounts to only around twenty known pastels, most of which entered museum collections in Paris and Stockholm rather than continuing to circulate privately, so auction appearances are infrequent. The valuation service MR Expert lists a pastel, Portrait de Marie-Joseph Peyre, architecte du roi, as her best documented sale, at EUR 31,000 against an estimate of EUR 18,000 to 22,000, and states that her works typically realize between EUR 15,000 and EUR 35,000 at auction. The auction house and exact sale date for that record are not published in the available sources, and no higher price for her work has been identified.

Because Roslin's oeuvre is small and mostly held in museums, individual pastels rarely reach the open market, and the pricing evidence that does exist, an estimated EUR 15,000 to 35,000 range with a best documented result of EUR 31,000, rests on limited and incompletely sourced transactions. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and comparison to the securely attributed works at the Louvre and the Nationalmuseum are the main tools for authentication. Collectors should treat any single sale result as indicative rather than as a reliable trend line, given how rarely her work is tested at auction.