You wouldn't get away with it these days. But in the eighteenth century, you could go spend a few years in Turkey, come back with a big beard, and call yourself ‘the Turkish Painter’ like Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789) did. Call it cultural appropriation or just an incredibly embarrassing gap year, but it worked. Liotard was a sensation.
He was a leading miniaturist and a master of pastels, able to sell his beautiful depiction of a woman and a young girl sharing breakfast for 200 guineas, a good wodge in 1754. So good, that 20 years later he took a second stab at it, likely hoping for another big sale. This later version was an almost exact replica but done in oils, and the two have been united here at the National Gallery for possibly the first time since 1773.
It’s the most luxurious game of spot-the-difference ever. The same elements appear in both: two figures in stunningly rendered clothes, their hair sculpted in the styles of the era, sit at the breakfast table. The young girl dips her bread into a cup of coffee that’s just about to overflow. The table is laid with a pewter coffee pot and a clashing set of porcelain teacups. This is high society, with its high society tastes in fashion and food and decorative arts, captured with gentleness, precision, tenderness and unbelievable skill. I’m not sure they’re perfect. The woman’s thumb feels fat and flat, the hair a little lifeless, but that’s what you pick up when you stare at two versions of the same work for an hour.
It’s the most luxurious game of spot-the-difference ever.
There are two main differences the gallery points out. First, the bright blue porcelain of the pastel work has turned a muddy brown in the oil version, the result of a blue pigment which has lost its colour over time. The second is the small sheet of music notation paper poking out of the drawer, with a different date in each work. But there’s a third difference: where the light in the pastel is impossibly soft and diffuse, it’s become brutally hard in the oil and now casts a heavy shadow on the wall. Despite their similarities, the oil is so much more dramatic and intense as a result.
The rest of the show is supporting material: a seventeenth century Japanese tea cup and saucer, drawings, miniatures and portraits from Liotard’s time in London. These free National Gallery displays let you really focus on and lose yourself in just a handful of works instead of getting swamped by dozens, like in most exhibitions. This is a chance to just look, to concentrate and consider and think and feel, to have a genuinely pure, unadulterated, lovely art-viewing experience. And to consider growing a beard.