Wandering through Geneva’s Museum of Art and History, you may miss whatever works by Jean-Etienne Liotard happen to be on exhibit. There is no particular spotlight on this native son, no separate gallery with his name writ large to focus visitor attention on the work – oil paintings and drawings – of what is one of the 18th century’s finest artists.
But anyone who does happen upon the rooms where Liotard’s work is shown is bowled over by the atmosphere and penetrating acuity of his portraits paired with a spectacularly brilliant technical flair and a sensual esthete’s attention to the sheen of fabric, the patterns of lace, the gleam of gold buttons or jeweled earrings – a reveling in the volumes, patterns and designs of clothing. This never crosses over into some self-fueled extravagance, however; it is always held in check by Liotard's psychological astuteness, his insight into the personality of the subject. These qualities come through especially powerfully in the artist’s pastel drawings.
Liotard’s Life
Son of a Protestant jeweler who fled religious persecution in his native France and settled in Geneva, Liotard was thus born – in 1702 – Genevois (not Swiss, since Geneva only became part of Switzerland in the early 19th century). After training as an artist, he set off on what would turn out to be decades of travel as he moved from city to city, royal court to royal court. Some of the artist’s most famous portraits include those of Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and her brood of children including then seven-year-old Marie Antoinette, later the wife of doomed French king Louis XVI.
Renowned too are works known as turqueries – depictions of interiors, natives of Constantinople or visitors clad in local clothing that Liotard painted when he lived in what is now the Turkish city of Istanbul from 1738 to 1742. Liotard also had the habit of painting himself periodically, and comparing these self-portrayals as the years passed is richly insightful. The artist painted genre scenes and still lifes of great beauty, and here and there snippets of landscape enhance portraits inciting regret that only one actual landscape painting by Liotard is presently known (although he is unlikely to have painted many since his renown – and high earnings – came from portraits).
It wasn’t until he reached the age of 55, quite elderly for the time, that this globetrotter with a gift for slightly eccentric self-promotion (he had grown a long Turkish-style beard in Constantinople which made him an instantly recognizable figure) married. He returned to Geneva, a rich man, in 1776 where he died 13 years later, on the eve of the French Revolution, aged 87.
Collections Including Works By Liotard
The largest collections of works by Liotard are in Geneva, Bern, but also Amsterdam – like his father, Liotard's son married a Dutch girl, and a sizable collection of works by the father has ended up in the Rijksmuseum. But there are also works in London at the Victoria and Albert and British Museum, and Paris at the Louvre.The pastel illustrated here is in the collection of the Gemaeldegalerie in Dresden, Germany.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also possesses a work by Liotard, and the museum’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History on its website describes the artist as ‘’one of the most original and talented draftsmen of the eighteenth century.’’ The first ‘’one-man show’’ of Liotard’s work in the US took place at the Frick in New York in 2006, when Geneva’s museum and Swiss collectors loaned some 50 pieces for the exhibit, the catalogue to which is one of the few sources of information about Liotard in English.
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