Jean-Etienne Liotard

After studying in his home city of Geneva and then Paris, he lived and worked in Constantinople (now Istanbul) . He often worked in pastel, but also painted in oil. After he returned to Europe in 1742, his portraits became so popular that high-profile customers were queuing up to be painted. For 40 years Liotard travelled far and wide for commissions, and from 1755 to 1757 he lived in the Netherlands. He was a great admirer of the understated beauty and simplicity of 17th-century Dutch genre and still-life paintings, and they inspired his own depictions of intimate domestic scenes. Liotard married a Dutch woman, Marie Fargues. Thanks to gifts from their granddaughter and great-granddaughter, the Rijksmuseum has been able to display an important collection of the artist’s work.