Jean Etienne Liotard Giclée Fine Art Prints 1 of 4

A beard falling almost to his chest, a fur-trimmed caftan, a turban worn in the drawing rooms of Paris and Vienna: the costume was theatre, but the eye behind it was pitiless. Jean-Étienne Liotard (22 December 1702 - 12 June 1789) was a Genevan painter, pastellist, printmaker, art dealer and theorist who made portraiture an instrument of exact observation rather than flattery. Rome, Constantinople, Vienna, Paris, London, Amsterdam - he worked in all of them, and in each he insisted that the truthful surface of a human face was worth more than any borrowed allegory.

Geneva claimed him first. He was born in the Republic of Geneva to Antoine Liotard, a merchant and citizen of the city, and to Anne Sauvage, both of them French Protestants who had fled north after 1685. A twin brother, Jean-Michel, followed a parallel path as draughtsman and engraver. Early instruction came from the miniaturist Daniel Gardelle, in whose workshop the young Liotard handled enamel and miniature painting, though the arrangement lasted only some four months. Even then, the portraits he produced announced an unusual command of likeness.

In 1725 he left for Paris and the studio of the miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Massé, where he spent three years copying. The relationship was an allouage, a paid placement rather than a formal apprenticeship, and it left him with technical fluency and little else. Around 1728 he set up on his own. Four years later he entered the competition of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, whose prescribed subject in 1732 was the high priest Ahimelech handing David the sword of Goliath; the submission won nothing. Enamel occupied him more than pastel in this period, and he issued engraved portraits of Voltaire and Fontenelle, advertising them in the press. That Parisian rebuff proved unexpectedly productive. Refused as a history painter in oil, he turned toward the medium in which his gifts were incomparably greater.

Travel released him. In 1735 he went south with Louis Philogène Brûlart, French ambassador to Naples and Rome, and in Rome painted Pope Clement XII along with several cardinals. Two years later he portrayed the exiled James Francis Edward Stuart, Jacobite claimant to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland, together with his sons - pastels now lost. Then, in 1738, came the journey that reshaped his career: he accompanied Lord Duncannon to Constantinople and remained four years.

What he found there he recorded with a documentary calm rare in the period. Rather than staging exotic fantasy, he drew Turkish domestic interiors, women at their needlework, servants, quiet rooms. Travellers were advised to adopt local dress, and Liotard did so with conviction, keeping beard and Ottoman costume long after his return to Europe. The nickname followed him: the Turkish painter. A vogue followed too. Sitters who had never crossed the Bosphorus, Madame de Pompadour among them, asked to be shown in Eastern clothes, and canvases such as A Turkish Lady and her Servant of 1750 satisfied a European appetite for the East while remaining, in their detail, oddly faithful to it.

Vienna received him in 1742, where he portrayed members of the imperial family. Three years later the Venice-based dealer Francesco Algarotti bought The Chocolate Girl for the Dresden pastel cabinet, and with it Liotard acquired the work by which most people still know him. A servant carries a glass of water and a cup of chocolate across a plain ground; nothing happens, and everything is seen. In the pastel Breakfast of the Lavergne Family, made in 1752 and now in the National Gallery, London, the same discipline governs a domestic scene of astonishing textural precision.

England came next. In 1753 he painted Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Princess of Wales; by 1756 he had moved to the Dutch Republic, and there, the following year, he married Marie Fargues, herself from a Huguenot family. She wanted the beard gone. He shaved it. Perhaps the exotic persona had by then served its purpose, and the painter no longer needed a costume to be recognised. Further commissions took him back to Vienna in 1762, where his sitters included the young Marie Antoinette, and to Paris in 1770.

A second English visit in 1772 saw his name among the exhibitors at the Royal Academy over the following two years. He was by then a formidable connoisseur, and the old master paintings he had assembled were sold in London at high prices - a reminder that the eighteenth-century artist was often merchant as well as maker. In 1776 he came home to Geneva. Five years later he published the Traité des principes et des règles de la peinture, arguing that painting should serve as a mirror of nature and that l'élimination des touches, the suppression of visible brushwork, was essential to that end. Pastel, he maintained, achieved this more readily than oil. Diderot had already declared in his Dictionnaire raisonné of 1751 that pastel was the finest medium for portraiture; Liotard supplied the theory to match the practice. His last years produced still lifes and landscapes, among them a plate of fruit on a crumpled napkin, dated 1782, that would not look out of place beside Chardin. He died in Geneva in 1789.

The craft deserves attention. Liotard worked chiefly on vellum, the calf, goat or lamb skin that holds pigment with maximum brilliance, often preparing it with fish glue and wine mixed with fine pumice dust; on paper supports he favoured the blue sheets then popular for the way they intensified colour. He pressed the pastel firmly into the ground, harder than his contemporaries, and that pressure accounts for the luminosity that distinguishes his work from the softer, powdery surfaces of the age. Most eighteenth-century pastels were never fixed, and Liotard's are no exception, which makes them fragile, moisture-sensitive and a permanent anxiety for conservators. Their survival is something close to fortune.

One detail is easily overlooked: his sitters smile. Portraiture of the period preferred gravity, yet in Liotard's pastels a faint amusement plays across the mouth again and again, a small Enlightenment argument that dignity and pleasure are not opposed. He also painted subjects celebrating science and medicine, including a woman rendering thanks to the physician who saved her. The painter of truth, peintre de la vérité, was a modern in the fullest sense.

His work is now dispersed across Europe and America - the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, enriched by his family's Dutch connections and holding The Artist's Niece, Marianne Lavergne, known as La Liseuse, as well as the self-portrait set against Mont Blanc; the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden; the J. Paul Getty Museum, with the unforgettable Maria Frederike van Reede-Athlone at Seven; the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Geneva; the Museum of Fine Arts Bern; the Louvre; the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum; and the Uffizi, where his self-portrait hangs among the painters. Three centuries on, these faces meet us without ceremony, and that is precisely what unsettles. Liotard offers no rhetoric, no elevation, only the extraordinary proposition that looking closely is enough.