New Liotard exhibition
July 12 2015
Picture: Shonbrunn Palace, Vienna
The new Jean-Etienne Liotard exhibition here in Edinburgh, at the Scottish National Gallery, is extremely good - and well worth a trip if you can make it. That said, the show moves to the Royal Academy in the Autumn.
I blagged a trip to the press preview, where I pretty much had the place to myself. This was lucky, for the delicacy and stillness of Liotard's works, the majority of which are in pastel, is best appreciated in silence and space. When looking at Liotard's portrait of his daughter, above, I experienced one of those rare moments when my eye was momentarily fooled by the painting's exquisite realism; for a split second, I believed I was looking at an actual wooden doll. Then my brain caught up - nope, that's a painting. It's happened to me before with a Holbein.
Anyway, for mastering the then relatively new medium of pastel, Liotard ranks for me as one of the great geniuses of painting. To see so many works together in one place and in good condition was a treat. He could also paint in oil - though the portraits on show reveal a hesitancy and adherence to convention one doesn't see in his pastels - and he was good at portrait miniatures too, as a fine pair of Charles Edward Stuart and Henry Benedict Stuart (below) show.
I was glad to see the below portrait of the Countess of Northampton on display as a work fully catalogued as by Liotard. It had recently been sold at Christie's in New York as 'attributed to Liotard' for the relative bargain price of $242,500. The picture had been rejected by the authors of the 2008 catalogue raisonné, but was considered an autograph work by the great pastel connoisseur, Neil Jeffares. For what it's worth, I saw the picture at the sale and thought then that it was 'right'. It now belongs to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth - a good buy, for a not dissimilar and fully catalogued Liotard made almost £1.2m in Paris in 2012.
The show is in Edinburgh till 13th September. There is an excellent catalogue, available here.
