Liotard’s world is global and optimistic, calm and coherent. His pastel portrait of Eva Maria Garrick, wife of the actor David Garrick, captures her thoughtful face as she turns away from the artist, a pale, silvery presence recorded with warmth. Is there an Ottoman influence on his pastel portraits? Liotard’s precision is definitely reminiscent of Turkish court miniaturists. It once belonged to the 18th-century art collector Horace Walpole, for Liotard was a star when he came back from Constantinople to cannily set up shop in London, where portraits were in demand in a bustling commercial art world. Photograph: Jean-Etienne Liotard/Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2023Ī miniature self-portrait shows Liotard in profile in Turkish dress. Precision … a miniature self-portrait by Liotard, about 1753. Signora Marigot, depicted in Smyrna in 1738, stands with elegant swagger, hand on hip, a necklace between her breasts. His portraits of women living in the Ottoman empire, who may be western travellers or Jewish residents, are full of character and autonomy. After meeting an English aristocrat friend in the street one day, he spontaneously agreed to join him on a trip to Constantinople, where he grew a beard in Muslim style and stayed several years. Liotard took his Swiss spirit of sweet reason with him along with his pastel box in a life of travel and curiosity. It was a cosmopolitan melting pot, a home from home for intellectuals such as the historian Edward Gibbon. He was born in Geneva in Switzerland, a city that by the 1700s was so Enlightened it put a classical temple facade on its cathedral. This delicate, precise medium perfectly suited the reasonable, consciously civilised ethos of the Enlightenment and Liotard’s mastery of it made him a star across Europe and beyond. Invented in the Renaissance and hugely popular in the 1700s, pastel crayons hold powdered pigment in a waxy, chalky binding mixture that lets you “paint” by drawing: they don’t mix, so a professional needs hundreds of different coloured crayons. There’s a full box of antique pastel sticks from the early 1900s and a film of traditional pastel making in France. The exhibition starts with an introduction to pastels. It’s not just the socialising of a child we see but the calm of early morning, the glow of light on ceramic and metal and polished wood, the intent faces of the two coffee drinkers. Liotard is asking you to slow down, stop, and simply see the beauty of ordinary moments in an ordinary day. What is so special about this morning in 1754 that it needs to be so lovingly remembered? Both versions hang side by side at the heart of this intriguing encounter with an artist few of us have even heard of. It’s a picture so good Liotard did it twice – first in pastels then, a decade later, in oil on canvas.
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