Resemblance as a Passing Quality: Liotard, La Tour, and the Question of Le Faire in Eighteenth-Century Portraiture

In his autobiography, preserved as a handwritten copy by his son and never intended for publication in this form, Jean-Étienne Liotard recounts how he came to lose Madame de Pompadour, the French king’s maîtresse en titre, as a powerful patron: Asked in October 1749 by the Maréchal de Saxe to take his recently finished portrait (fig. 19) to Versailles, where the queen wanted to see it, Liotard also brought with him “the portrait of one of his nieces reading a letter” (fig. 1) as well as the likeness of a lady of the court – paintings that were at first ignored by the dauphin, but so much admired by the dauphine, the queen, and their children that Liotard was commissioned to paint the entire royal family. Even Louis XV sat for him – if only after Madame de Pompadour had assured the skeptical king that he absolutely had to have himself painted by Liotard, for this artist knew so well how to capture his sitters’ resemblance, “puisquil attrape si bien les ressemblances.”^[1]

1

Jean-Étienne Liotard, Marianne Lavergne Reading a Letter (“La liseuse”), 1746, pastel on vellum, 54 × 43 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

He also painted Madame de Pompadour herself, Liotard continues in his autobiography, but “he did not court her as he should have done. He made her wait for the delivery of the portrait, which was why he lost a powerful protectress who would have helped him to make a fortune […], or at least to be properly paid for his pictures of the royal family […].”^[2] However, as the letters reveal that the Pompadour sent in 1750 to her brother, then travelling in Italy, this delay was not really the cause. Other painters kept the Pompadour waiting even longer. Neither was she able to send him the repeatedly announced portrait of the king by Charles Van Loo nor her own by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, who would ultimately take more than six years (fig. 2).^[3] In fact, Liotard’s portrait seems to have been one of the first she ever received. Yet, as she wrote to her brother on 25 April 1750: “I am having the one by Liotard copied – no idea if anything good can be done with it.”^[4]

2

Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Madame de Pompadour, ca. 1755, pastel on vellum, 175 × 128 cm. Paris, Louvre

What Liotard’s portrait of the Pompadour looked like is no longer known. There must have been several, i.e., one or two pastels in bust length (which could be presented together with that of the king), but also miniature paintings.^[5] An interesting suggestion has been made by Helge Siefert, who identifies the portrait of an unknown lady, now in Aarau, with the maîtresse en titre (fig. 3).^[6] This is usually rejected in research on Liotard, but seems worth considering – not only because the (cursory) descriptions of the Marquise at the time (the lively gaze, the alert mind, etc.) do not contradict the appearance.^[7] There is also a remarkable resemblance to confirmed depictions of the Pompadour by other ‘faithful’ artists such as Van Loo, La Tour, or Pigalle (fig. 4; note the conspicuously drooping lower eyelids, the not-so-small nose stepped at the front, the pursed lips, the hairline, etc.).^[8] Be that as it may, it can be assumed that Liotard’s portrait of the Pompadour will have revealed that quality in particular for which the Marquise had recommended the painter to Louis XV – the ressemblance; a quality which, however, did not interest the Pompadour in her own portraits. As is well known, she ultimately gave preference to François Boucher. Thus, in April 1750, she commented on his portrait (fig. 5) in a letter to her brother: “I am finally sending you the copy of my portrait by Boucher; it resembles the original very much, me little. Nevertheless: quite nice.”^[9] And in June 1750: “I am very relieved that you are satisfied with my portraits; they have been found very pretty here but little resembling […] because that is the least of the evils, I have sent them to you.”^[10] Hence, Liotard’s failure to please the Pompadour had little to do with the belated completion of her portrait. Rather, it was his specific pictorial concept that collided with the Pompadour’s pictorial policy.

3

Jean-Étienne Liotard, A Lady of the Court (Madame de Pompadour?), ca. 1750, pastel on vellum, 59.5 × 48.5 cm. Aarau, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Deposit Gottfried Keller-Stiftung, Bundesamt für Kultur Bern

4

Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Madame de Pompadour, ca. 1748–1751, white marble, 75.9 × 47.3 × 28.9 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum

5

François Boucher, Madame de Pompadour at Her Toilette, ca. 1750–1758, oil on canvas, 81.2 × 64.9 cm. Cambridge, MA, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museum, Bequest of Charles E. Dunlap

Contemporaries have repeatedly emphasized “truthfulness” as a key feature of Liotard’s pictorial concept. Pierre Clément, for example, reports in his Les cinq années littérairesthat Liotard “has been in Paris for some time and is very fashionable; and that in spite of the sincerity of his brush and the exorbitance of his prices […]. Furrowed brows, beaten eyes, and equivocal faces fear him as villains fear the look of an honest man; but beauty, youth, naive graces, and reasonable people are for him.”^[11] In a very similar vein, English art connoisseur Horace Walpole in his Anecdotes of Painting emphasizes the truth in Liotard’s painting, though not without commenting on this quality sarcastically:

His likenesses were as exact as possible, and too like to please those who sat to him; thus he had great business the first year, and very little the second. Devoid of imagination, and one would think of memory, he could render nothing but what he saw before his eyes. Freckles, marks of the small-pox, every thing found its place: not so much from fidelity, as because he could not conceive the absence of anything that appeared to him. Truth prevailed in all his works, grace in very few or none.^[12]

And he continues: “Nor was there any ease in his outline; but the stiffness of a bust in all his portraits. Thence, though more faithful to a likeness, his heads want air and the softness of flesh so conspicuous in Rosalba’s pictures.”^[13]

What Walpole is addressing here in these last two sentences is the question of le faire, the exécution, the special brush or chalk stroke. Indeed, Liotard’s so precise, detailed painting is exceptional in its time and technique (the pastel first and foremost). As an exemplary statement on theideal dominantly advocated in mideighteenthcentury Paris, we shall only quote what Denis Diderot emphasizes in his Salon of 1763 with regard to the genre of portraiture: “The merit of resembling is passing; it is the merit of the brush that astonishes in the moment and makes the work an eternal one.”^[14]

In the following, I would like to take a closer look at this “merit of the brush” (or the chalk), which by the mid-eighteenth century became a decisive criterion in art criticism and – as will be shown – is always a key issue in Liotard’s work as well. For Liotard, too, not only the ressemblance (the what, the depicted), but also this faire (the specific manner of execution) is a central quality, as his treatise on the principles and rules of painting reveals, which he published at an advanced age in 1781.^[15] However, Liotard does not propagate the open, bold, bravura brush or chalk stroke (the touches hardies), as Diderot suggests in the passage just quoted, but a closed, detailed, and immaculate painting surface; the fini, which for Liotard cannot be overdone and which in his eyes – when coupled with taste – is one of the most pleasing, but also most difficult, rare, and appreciated parts of painting: “Le fini est une des plus agréables parties de la peinture; il est très-difficile de finir avec goût; aussi les ouvrages trèsfinis, & qui le sont avec goût, sont les plus rares & les plus estimés.”^[16]

This ideal of Liotard’s could be observed more closely with the example of virtually all of his paintings. However, one pastel seems particularly interesting in this respect – Liotard’s so-called Breakfast at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich (fig. 9; once in the collection of William Stanhope, 2nd Earl of Harrington). Identified with the “Portrait d’une Dame prenant du Chocolat,” which Liotard added at the last moment to his massive showing of 30 works at the Salon of the Académie de Saint-Luc in 1752, this is a painting that obviously had special significance for the artist.^[17] Liotard exhibited at the time his self-portrait with a long beard in front of the easel (fig. 6); another self-portrait in enamel; ten of his much sought-after drawings aux deux crayons from Constantinople and Jassy (fig. 7); the portrait of the king, presumably his second portrait of Louis XV mentioned in the autobiography (fig. 8),^[18] and that of the dauphine; five portraits, partly painted in oils, of the Mesdames de France (other than those exhibited in 1751); the portrait of the Maréchal de Saxe (fig. 19) and another Maréchal in French service as well as portraits of famous personalities from the Parisian artistic milieu.^[19] This selection was not by chance: with these paintings (which at the same time presented the range of techniques he mastered), Liotard not only promoted his epithet “le Peintre Turc” – established in Europe since 1744 and based on his five-year stay in Constantinople and Jassy^[20] – but also justified his title “Peintre ordinaire du roi,” under which he exhibited at the Académie de Saint-Luc.^[21] The picture of a lady enjoying chocolate (fig. 9) stands out here. It can be understood as a somewhat larger variation – now responding to the sophisticated consumer culture in Paris – on his “Portrait of one of his nieces reading a letter” (fig. 1), which had earned him the favor of the royal family and won much acclaim when shown at the Académie de Saint-Luc in 1751.^[22]

6

Jean-Étienne Liotard, Self-Portrait “with a Long Beard”, ca. 1751–1752, pastel on paper, mounted on canvas, 97 × 71 cm. Geneva, Musée d’art et d’histoire

7

Jean-Étienne Liotard, Lady from Constantinople, Seated in a Divan, ca. 1738–1742, charcoal and red chalk on white paper, 20.6 × 17 cm. Paris, Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques

8

Jean-Étienne Liotard, Louis XV, ca. 1749–1751, pastel on blue-grey paper, 63 × 46.5 cm. Stupinigi (Turin), Fondazione Ordine Mauriziano

9

Jean-Étienne Liotard, The Breakfast (“Portrait d’une Dame prenant du Chocolat”), ca. 1752–1753, pastel on vellum, 67.3 × 54 cm. Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek (on loan from the HypoVereinsbank)

Though described as a “portrait” in the 1752 exhibition catalogue, the Munich pastel (fig. 9) is usually classified as a genre painting – a categorization which in my view misses its programmatic nature. Even if the two figures are shownin action (by which Liotard probably reacted to the criticism of the lifelessness of his paintings), the pastel is explicitly kept in the close-up format of a portrait; any depiction of the interior is missing.^[23] That the name of this lady remains unspecified is not at odds with the assumption that the picture was meant as a statement on the genre of portraiture.^[24] Against the background of the debacle with the Pompadour described above, it indeed seems likely that this confusion of genres (to which the still life might be added) was deliberate. In this close-up representation in portrait format, Liotard frees himself from the unloved claim to invent a socially valid image for a certain Parisian personality (as Boucher so successfully did for the Pompadour), or to penetrate into the personality’s innermost being (as La Tour claimed for himself), in order to be able – as I will argue – to demonstrate in an exemplary and undisturbed way what, in his opinion, should distinguish every good portrait, indeed every great painting: the very precise observation. What is more, the anonymity of this young woman enables Liotard to direct the attention (which in the genre of portraiture all too quickly gets stuck on the depicted person – a recognizable ressemblance) to the manner of his depiction; to the faire claimed by Diderot, which ultimately makes the artist the actual subject of the picture – his hand, his talent, his specific form of artistic bravura.^[25]

What, then, does Liotard show us in this ‘portrait’? We see a young woman in three-quarter profile, her gaze raised, resting in a broad wooden armchair. With her left hand, to protect her turquoise-green dress, she pulls a brown, pink-blue lined cloth over her lap in order to receive the tray that a young maid is carefully serving her from the left, her gaze concentrated on what she is carrying – a cup of chocolate, and a glass of water.

That this young woman was at the lever, the (second) morning toilet, like the lady in Lancret’s Le Matin (fig. 11), her dress a morning robe, her hair still coiled in curlers, as has been claimed, is not correct.^[26] In fact, she wears a robe à la française adorned with pleated fabric panels and transparent lace in keeping with the latest Parisian fashion.^[27] This is also true of her hair, which she has laid in parallel curls at the sides, powdered and adorned above the crown with several blue velvet flowers, which, boldly contrasting with the turquoise-green dress, lend the picture a very distinct, strong color accent.

This get-up is fashion-conscious and luxurious, and so is the hot beverage the young lady is about to consume (fig. 10). In eighteenthcentury Europe, chocolate was a pleasure food reserved for the highest social strata, more expensive than the equally ‘exotic’ beverages coffee or tea. Imported from the New World as early as the sixteenth century, chocolate ranked high among the lucratively traded luxury goods from the transatlantic colonies (the labor of enslaved people was involved).^[28] Mixed with water, sugar, and other imported spices such as cinnamon, cloves, vanilla, or lemon peel, then foamed into a thick liquid and drunk warm, chocolate was a remedy also recommended by doctors and consumed mainly in the morning.^[29] The young maid serves this fragrant, dark drink in a white porcelain Meissen-style cup, i.e., the European imitation of a material associated with China.^[30] East Asia is also evoked in the wooden tray (though of European manufacture), in whose smooth dark surface the saucer is reflected, while the glass of water with a golden rim refers to the Bohemian culture (the Bohemian was the best glass). What fascinated the public so much about Liotard’s self-presentation in original Ottoman garb and with a long beard (fig. 6) – the foreign, the ‘exotic’ – is also provided by this pastel: Liotard offers in his picture and with his picture the consumption of globally traded, highly sought-after luxury goods.^[31]

10

Detail of the tray and dress from Jean-Étienne Liotard, The Breakfast (“Portrait d’une Dame prenant du Chocolat”; fig. 9)

Note the materialities, how Liotard succeeds in imitating with his powdery pastels the glistening sheen of the smooth white opaque cup, which is different from the shimmering sheen on the golden rim of the transparent glass of water. Note the reflections on this glass – rendered with two slanting white strokes – and the precise observation of the unexpected reflection through the transparent liquid: the servant’s thumb appears in the front part of the glass, even though in fact it is behind it; the water becomes a magnifying glass that enlarges the pattern of the tray, and the mirrored object appears reversed. The early Netherlandish painters already knew about these optically astonishing tricks of nature, which Liotard observes very closely and reproduces meticulously with the thinnest chalks – sometimes also in gouache, i.e., with pigments dissolved in water, which he then applies with a thin brush.^[32]

Liotard shows wonderfully detailed surfaces with clearly differentiated material qualities, and this also applies to the lady’s dress (fig. 10). Note how the side panels detach from the bodice as a result of the sitting pose, and the mastery with which Liotard employs clair-obscur to give depth to the imitation of sewn-on pleating. The painter even reproduces practical details such as the small black seams with which the fabric around the buttonholes has been reinforced. And note the transparency of the skin, how Liotard subtly lets blue tones shine through. On the hands, but also the face (fig. 14), this skin is uniformly smooth, even flawless – just like all the surfaces in this painting.

Liotard displays no touches whatsoever, none of those open, as if quickly thrown down, chalk strokes that are so characteristic of the art of pastel. A comparison with the works of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, the most important pastel painter in Paris around 1750 and Liotard’s greatest rival, can illuminate this.^[33] Whereas Liotard seeks to imitate the sensitive tissue of the skin with the finest, parallel chalk strokes as a closed surface (fig. 14), La Tour articulates the skin with isolated, bold touches left unconnected as such. Excellently preserved pastels such as the portrait of the tax collector Jean-Baptiste Philippe (fig. 12) shown in the Salon in 1748 allow these chalk strokes to be recognized even from a distance, tonally enhancing the light or intensifying the shadow.^[34]

11

Nicholas Lancret, Morning, 1739, oil on copper, 28.3 × 36.4 cm. London, National Gallery (bequeathed by Sir Bernard Eckstein, 1948)

12

Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Baptiste Philippe, 1748, pastel on blue paper, mounted on canvas, 67 × 55 cm. Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek

Arguably, this comparison is not entirely correct. After all, the gender-specific difference must be taken into account. La Tour, too, captures the skin of women – which at that time was understood to be principally finer – with finer strokes.^[35] Thus the touches in the face of Mlle Ferrand (fig. 13) are clearly reduced, tonally more adapted to the ground, less bold and freely set.^[36] Eighteenth-century art criticism demanded this differentiation and granted it precisely to Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. As Charles Léoffroy de Saint-Yves writes in his Observations sur les arts (1748):

13

Detail of the face from Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Mademoiselle Ferrand Meditating on Newton, ca. 1752–1753, pastel on blue paper, mounted on canvas, 74.2 × 60.7 cm. Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek

The figures of old men and those of similar character, when they exceed the ordinary size of a man, necessarily require vigorous brushstrokes. The delicate flesh of women and children, on the other hand, can only be rendered with a smooth and soft brush: this spreads the grace inseparable from gentleness (douceur); […] the great merit of every painter is […] to proportion his strokes to the character of things […]. No one observes this rule better than M. de La Tour.^[37]

In keeping with this directive, La Tour reduced the touches in Mlle Ferrand’s face (fig. 13); in comparison with Liotard (fig. 14), however, they remain striking. Note how La Tour imitates the shine on the nose with three open light chalk strokes which at the same time articulate the curvature of this nose by their interruption. Liotard is quite different: in his painting, too, a sheen can be discerned on the tip of the nose, a brightening along the ridge, which, however, is completely connected to the evenly smooth, uniform, and flawless surface.

14

Detail of the lady’s face from Jean-Étienne Liotard, The Breakfast (“Portrait d’une Dame prenant du Chocolat”; fig. 9)

Raking light photographs clearly reveal that the material surfaces are indeed very different.^[38] While Liotard’s pastels show an incredibly fine, powdery surface (fig. 15a in raking light; fig. 15b in normal lighting), the surface of La Tour’s works (figs. 15c – d) are much coarser. This also has to do with the painting grounds, which Liotard chose and prepared with the utmost care. Thus he mostly used parchment, the skin of calves, and, for small pictures, vellum, the skin of unborn animals, which is even more delicate, uniform, and light.^[39] La Tour, by contrast, usually painted on blue paper, a much coarser material which, after rubbing off the knots and grains, can ideally hold the powder of pastel, while also contributing to the illusion structurally (i.e., as a felty texture) and color-wise (i.e., as a translucent tone).^[40] If individual strokes can be seen in Liotard’s pastel, it is only where he renders the eyelashes hair by hair. In the flesh, however, thecolors are applied evenly and delicately and – as his pupil Karoline Luise von Hessen-Darmstadt documents Liotard’s instructions for painting in pastel in 1746 – “as much as possible shimmered over each other […] to avoid the Placken” (the latter meaning the touches).^[41]

15

a Detail of the lady’s eye from Jean-Étienne Liotard, The Breakfast (“Portrait d’une Dameprenant du Chocolat”; fig. 9), in raking light; b the same in ordinary lighting; c Detail of the eye from Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Baptiste Philippe (fig. 12), in raking light; d the same in ordinary lighting

La Tour, on the other hand, leaves numerous chalk strokes of varying thicknesses and densities open on the surface (fig. 16). Lower brown, partly bluish, grayish layers of color, created with broad chalk, shine through – closed layers finished by means of countless small, boldly contrasting, criss-crossing touches in red, brown, black, blue, and white chalk that intensify the light and shadow and accentuate the different tones and textures of the skin.^[42] Just like the poses of his sitters (figs. 12, 17, 18) – La Tour usually presents them with their gaze directed out of the picture and slightly elevated, nonchalantly addressing the beholder as if in a familiar conversation, with a gentle smile and flashing eyes that seem to wander, as they do not focus on the same point – the touches in their open, sketchy form make the picture vibrate, increase the liveliness, and create the effect of physical presence. The rapid stroke contains the traces of a movement that brings to light an apparently moving, cutaneously changing subject, a living personality.^[43]

16

Detail of the face from Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Baptiste Philippe (fig. 12)

17

Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Marguerite Le Comte, ca. 1752–1753, pastel on blue paper, mounted on canvas, 64.8 × 62.5 cm. Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle

18

Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Hermann Moritz Count of Saxony, Marshal of France, ca. 1748, pastel on blue paper, 59 × 49 cm. Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister

This open, bravura execution was in fact what elitist art critics were asking for in Paris in those years. A painting should not be executed with meticulousness, but with a certain ease (facilité or légèreté), calculated carelessness (négligence), and perceptible boldness (hardiesse). Thus, with his conviction that it was not only the quality of ressemblance, but also the specific form of le faire that guaranteed the endurance of a portrait, Diderot was by no means alone. Rather, this merely corresponded to what was widely held in French art discourse in the mid-eighteenth century.

In his Royal Academy lecture on portraiture of 7 March 1750, the painter Louis Tocqué, too, emphasizes that the quality of a painting is decided by the brushwork (la beauté du pinceau). As important as ressemblance undoubtedly is – which has to be maintained no matter how unflattering the features may be – it alone is not enough, Tocqué argues, for it requires the gift of enthousiasme rather than mere meticulousness, the beau faire, la touche spirituelle, to become an excellent painter.^[44] In a very similar vein, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, the longtime secretary of the Académie Royale, stresses the importance of le faire in his Discours sur la connaissance des arts of 1759. According to Cochin, the refined taste of a painter reveals itself in the ease and certainty of the manière de faire and his seemingly effortless execution. It is the brushwork (ce beau maniement du pinceau) by which an artist realizes his idea with boldness and precision.^[45] Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, one of the Paris academy’s professors, also praises the boldness of the brushstroke (la hardiesse du tact) in his Traité de Peinture of 1765, wherein he discussed the merits of the beau faire: “In boldness we understand the ease [facilité] with which the brush, the chalk are handled […]. This ease presupposes a perfect understanding of forms, tones, and effects. Without this ease, one only fumbles and circles around the truth.”^[46] This is an argument that deserves special attention because here the question of truth (la verité) comes into play: open brushstrokes, which reveal the artificial means of illusion, i.e., the application of paint, do not irritate the depicted in this conception, do not deviate from the truth of nature, but actually bring it forth as such.^[47] Even if, according to Dandré-Bardon, artists rarely focus on the perfection of execution, it is extremely important. It serves the genius to display his talent: “The beauty of execution must be considered the skill genius employs to perfectly achieve its objective of pleasing and arousing interest.”^[48]

As this passage reveals, touches hardies were associated with artistic genius (le Génie créateur), an ideal that pervades eighteenth-century writings on art.^[49] The proof of genius was enthousiasme, defined by Dandré-Bardon as “a noble ardor, a wise passion, a moderated heat that glows, surprises, explodes”^[50] – a creative fervor that was nowhere to be found in those artists who rigidly adhere to the learned rules and who exercise shameful exactitude in their paintings. According to Dandré-Bardon, the man of genius (l’ homme de génie) rises above the rules (which he admittedly knows), takes risks that reveal enthousiasme, and puts no fetters on his imagination, so that he “raises his flight to Olympus, and, if necessary, enters into trade with the Gods.”^[51] It is precisely this concept of genius that Diderot had in mind when attributing heat to the paintings of Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, though not without noticing with surprise that this painter always remained cold in the act of creation:

I have seen La Tour painting, he is calm and cold; he does not torment himself, he does not suffer, he does not pant, he does not do any of the contortions of the enthusiastic modelleur, on whose face we see the succession of images he proposes to render […]. He does not imitate the gestures of the furious […], he does not become ecstatic […]; he remains cold, and yet his imitation is warm.^[52]

Seemingly thrown down quickly in the furor of creation, the touches were understood as traces of that inspired moment in which the mental excitement of an homme de géniefinds its way into the painting.^[53] Yet it is precisely these “traces of the soul” that, conversely, are capable of moving the soul of the beholder. As traces of the moving hand, the touches set the depicted in motion, enliven it, as the painter Louis Tocqué explains in his academy lecture on portraiture: “C’est la touche qui donne la vie et le mouvement.”^[54] The touches even give life to inanimate things, as Dandré-Bardon points out in his Traité de Peinture: “Ces touches donnent l’ame aux Etres même inanimés.”^[55] The sketched is the principle here: precisely because not everything is meticulously executed, the touches are able to involve the beholder’s imagination in the representation. “Why do we like a beautiful sketch more than a beautiful picture?” Diderot asks in his Salon of 1767: “The cause is that there is more life and less form. The more one perfects the form, the more the life disappears. […] The sketch is the work of creative fervor and genius […], it leaves more freedom to our imagination, which sees there whatever it pleases.”^[56]

Liotard was undoubtedly aware of these arguments – they are the very ones he so strongly opposes in his Traité des principes et des règles de la Peinture. As Liotard stresses there, it is a common prejudice, widespread throughout Europe, that good painting should be light, open, and sporting plenty of touches:

In the main cities of Europe, and especially in those where there are the most painters, there reign prejudices very contrary to the principles or rules I propose, and above all to those I have just prescribed: they do not cease to say that all good painting must be effortless, freely painted, and well touchéd; they have persuaded those who have no knowledge of the principles of art, & whom I will call ignorart, that any painting which does not have these three qualities cannot be good. I think very differently, and I believe that these good qualities lead to making nothing but beautiful sketches.^[57]

The fine and light delicacies of nature inherent to all objects, forming their most beautiful adornment, cannot, according to Liotard, be copied with ease, freedom, with touches. To imitate them rather requires all the attention, artistry, and patience imaginable, “il faut toute l’attention, tout l’art, et toute la patience possible.”^[58] It is not with bold brushstrokes, Liotard argues, that the desired effect of power and strength, of life and relief, can be achieved. Rather, it is “the quite difficult art of capturing the sensitive differences between light [clair] and shadow [ombre),” the art of distributing light and shadow in such a way “that there is no light that is as brown as the shadow, nor shadow that is as bright as the weakest light – in a word: that light and shadow are strongly distinguished from each other,” that contrasts are heightened.^[59]

According to Liotard, the boldly placed touches are not the sign of an inspired artistic genius, but a means of painters who are impatient, lazy, profit-seeking, or incapable of finishing a painting well – painters who pursue the sole interest of completing their works in the shortest time possible. Pictures painted with touches, Liotard emphasizes, are mere sketches; they represent a “falseness” because they abandon nature and thus the “truth” (la vérité) in painting.^[60]

Art critics in mid-eighteenth-century Paris saw things quite differently. Whereas Liotard insists on diligence, very precise observation, and painstaking, time-consuming labor, most writers on art underline that paintings with seemingly quick touches were as much the result of careful study as works executed in every detail. Though bold, loose touches may suggest a certain ease, in reality this kind of painting is consistently difficult. As evidence, the work of La Tour was brought into the field. His pastels, Pierre-Charles Lévesque observed, look as if the artist had been toying around with his crayons. This playfulness, however, which animates the painting, was the result of meticulous and thoughtful research.

If you look closely at a fine portrait by Latour, it seems that the painter was playing with his pastels: but this game by which the skilful artist imbued the canvas with life and passion succeeded to a painful and thoughtful study, and it was this study that gave him the ease to play by ensuring the character of forms and expressions through the final touches.^[61]

Art critics were of course well aware of the possible dangers associated with the technique of the touches. Tocqué, when addressing the Académie Royale’s students in his lecture on portraiture, emphasizes that in some cases it is necessary to curb one’s boldness (hardiesse) and enthusiasm (enthousiasme), and to contemplate nature with the necessary calm in order to discover all its beauties instead.^[62] Similarly, Dandré-Bardon warns against being quickly impressed by a lightly wielded brush. The boldness of the brushstroke must be accompanied by cleanliness and precision. If not properly applied, this technique betrayed nothing more than a wanton genius flatly trying to play off his talent in order to make an impression on the public.^[63] And yet, what Lévesque advised in the Dictionnaire des Arts applied in principle: “One often completes a work much better with […] correctly and skillfully placed touches than with slow and laborious operations of a cold patience.”^[64]

This is an argument that ultimately also had economic reasons. Since, as Lévesque further emphasizes, open painting (with touches), when seen from a distance, appears just as closed as painting with closed brushwork (le fini), the same precision is not needed in all of its parts.^[65] Liotard takes a completely different view. To the argument that it is wasted effort to execute all the details of a painting that can only be looked at from a distance, Liotard counters that a roughly painted picture will also appear rough from a distance:

A picture painted with plenty of touches is coarse up close and it remains coarse at a distance; nothing changes or can change in the picture at any distance, I don’t mean (let it be well observed) to alter, but to change in nature and form; when you think you can no longer see the brushstrokes, they are still there.^[66]

What is the point, Liotard argues, of a painting looking better from a distance when nothing can be seen from afar? Painting must be admirable from any distance and please all eyes, those of the connoisseurs, the ignorants, and even the short-sighted.^[67]

It is not art, but observable nature that is the guiding principle for Liotard: “Nature, which we must always take as our model, offers us none of those shocking inequalities that mar the masterpieces of our greatest masters. Everything in the sublime picture of nature is admirably linked; all the parts, even the most disparate, are imperceptibly united; we do not see any touches in the works of nature, which is a very strong reason not to use them in painting.” And as Liotard underpins his concept of truth: “You should never paint what you cannot see.”^[68]

Whereas others like Tocqué underline that there is great pleasure in studying the touches of a picture – “We like to get close to well- touchéd paintings; the more we examine them, the more satisfied we are”^[69] – for Liotard the touchesrepresent nothing other than ugliness. As he argues: “The more sensitive the touches [as required in portraits of women, M. K.], the harder they are, and the more they lead to an ugliness that shocks the sharp eye of the person who, penetrated by the true beauties of nature, wants to find them in the copies presented to him by the artist.”^[70] To underline this view, Liotard repeatedly compares the touches in his treatise to scars, burns, and marks of smallpox: “A touch on the skin unconnected with the paint on which it is applied looks like a cut, a burn, or a mark of smallpox.”^[71] A pastel like that of Marguerite le Comte by La Tour (fig. 17), in which even when seen from a greater distance the ‘sensitive’ touches on the cheeks do not connect with the closed layer of paint underneath, makes it particularly evident what Liotard means with this metaphor.^[72]Touches as cuts, burns, or pockmarks: This is a comparison that calls for attention, not only because Liotard uses it several times in his treatise, but also because it is by no means one of the common topoi in writing about art at the time. However, if we consider the epidemics of smallpox that raged throughout the eighteenth century, this metaphor immediately explains itself, as it would have been more comprehensible than any other to the readers of his time. If not fatal, smallpox disfigured the face, which could mean social death (at least for women). Liotard connects the aesthetic discourse with that of medicine, which in turn ventured into the realm of aesthetics, where it advocated the highly controversial, because life-threatening, smallpox vaccination.^[73]

In short, the Portrait d’une Dame prenant du Chocolat (fig. 9), added in 1752 to his 30 other works presented at the Académie de Saint-Luc, can be understood as a programmatic statement by Liotard on painting that takes up the argument of Parisian art critics of the time – the importance of le faire – and declares it to be the actual subject of this close-up painting. The anonymity of the woman supports the project. However, Liotard does not answer the question of le faire with the sought-after open, bravura chalk strokes that enliven what is shown and betray the enthousiasme – the creative fervor – of the artist, but with a strictly observant painting that remains dedicated to the uniformly closed, immaculate, clean surface – in the picture as well as of the picture.

This ideal of a smoothly finished painting (le fini), of course, entails the danger that the one quality which every painter operating with touches hardies brings into the foreground – his own talent and artistic genius – gets overlooked because the object represented absorbs all attention. In La Tour’s paintings, this bravura is doubly present: To argue that the sophisticated nonchalance (sprezzatura) of his sitters coincides with the nonchalance of his chalk lines would be missing the point.^[74] On the contrary, the reverse is true: La Tour adapts the facial expressions and poses of his sitters to the nonchalance and apparent légèretè (ease) of his chalk lines so that these sitters appear as confidently relaxed (at ease), and full of esprit (nonchalants) as they themselves never knew to be.^[75] A comparison of La Tour’s portrait of the Maréchal de Saxe (fig. 18) with that by Liotard (fig. 19) can shed further light on this. Whereas Liotard shows the Maréchal in his public function, standing erect and aloof in front of his tent in an open landscape, his gaze turned back over his shoulder from above, with a firm grip around the baton adorned with French fleurs-de-lis and a saber at his side, La Tour has the Maréchal in his close-up portrait (presented at the Salon of 1748) smile curiously amused by something out of the picture. Only a second glance reveals that beneath his red coat lined with soft fur and the black silk cravat tied around his neck he is wearing his cuirass; even the order of the Eagle (so prominently lit in Liotard’s portrait) and the blue sash with its virtuoso imitation of moiréare set in shadow.^[76] Here, in this – nonetheless leonine – portrait (fig. 18), it is not so much the martial army commander who is depicted (as in La Tour’s first pastel of the Maréchal clad in armor, shown in the Salon of 1747), but the famous seducer and salon lion who, in the last two years of his life (he died in 1750) concentrated entirely on the gathering of famous personalities from the arts, literature, and science in his Château de Chambord (which had been left to him by the king).^[77]

19

Jean-Étienne Liotard, Hermann Moritz Count of Saxony, Marshal of France, ca. 1748, pastel on vellum, 64 × 53 cm. Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister

As La Tour’s 1748 portrait of the Maréchal de Saxe in particular makes clear, the artist lends his sitters an appearance that goes beyond the quality of a matching ressemblance for which he, no less than Liotard, was so very much praised by art critics of the time: “[…] il a le talent précieux de faire parfaitement ressembler.”^[78] By means of his manière des touches, La Tour not only presents them with unequal aliveness – as Grimm, for example, aptly describes: “This great artist has pushed the art of his pastels so far that it is not enough just to paint resemblances perfectly, but he also knows how to animate his portraits, and to give them a life that has never been known before.”^[79] Besides that, La Tour also involves his sitters in his personal project of an homme d’esprit’s existence that is as witty and clever as it is confident and relaxed – the foundation of that Enlightenment worldview with which, according to Claudia Denk, La Tour attempted to revolutionize the traditional system of aristocratic society from within.^[80] Indeed, La Tour’s sitters, who despite their rank and celebrity seem as approachable and accessible as if they all were old friends,^[81] become, if you like, the embodiment of his art, the representation of his talent, regardless of their individual convictions and their very appearance (if we believe Mme de Pompadour, the Maréchal de Saxe was already in very poor health at the time, indeed a “walking corpse”).^[82] In his portraits, La Tour not only gathers the Who’s Who of the political and intellectual elite of his time, the amateurs and gens de lettres who, frequenting the Parisian salons, knew to appreciate and to discuss his art of open touches. He not only gives them a new face corresponding to enlightened ideals; rather, they become – as famous personalities easily recognized by the public – the touchstone and proof of his very own artistic genius. In short, the subject of the portraits of La Tour ultimately is no other than La Tour himself.

By contrast, Liotard – who does not elevate the artistes and connoisseurs, but the ignorart (uninformed beholders)^[83] to the best jurors of art – observes. The pose and gesture in his self-portrait is programmatic (fig. 6). As little interested in capturing the inner self as he was in the extroverted demonstration of artistic enthousiasme,^[84] Liotard poses his subjects – like objects – still in order to render the outwardly perceptible with an exact crayon. His endeavor and goal is not to find – to invent – a personality, as does La Tour (“I descend to the bottom of their selves, without their knowledge, and I bring them forth as a whole”),^[85] but – beyond all emotion – to depict with care the surfaces offered to the eye. The still life in his Munich pastel (figs. 9, 10) points to this. The downside is, of course, that without all the overt traces of his hand, Liotard runs the risk of disappearing as the author of his paintings.

Or so one might think. A close look at his pictures, however, shows that Liotard devises sophisticated strategies to escape precisely this danger – without betraying his pictorial concept. Two of these strategies seem particularly striking to me. One is the meticulous detail that attracts the eye, fascinates, and, when executed in the technique of powdery pastel, astonishes in its artistry. These small details, to be observed at close range, not only give great pleasure, as Liotard points out in his Traité^[86] (that jouissance that Tocqué finds in the open chalk line),^[87] but can also be enhanced to such a deceptive degree that the difference between being and appearance gets lost – only to collapse as an illusion in a second moment (at the latest when the hand wants to reach for the depicted object). Yet, this immediately raises the question – as with the trompe l’œilgenre, which Liotard also produced in its pure form (fig. 20) – as to who is the author of this fascinating eye trick.^[88] And the genius is back in play.

20

Jean-Étienne Liotard, Trompe L’Œil of two Bunches of Grapes Attached to a Fir Wood Panel, 1771, pastel on vellum, mounted on canvas, 40.5 × 32 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Another of Liotard’s strategies, however, is not to follow the self-promoted mimesis “as in nature” everywhere. And this is particularly interesting: Note, for example, how Liotard has only sketched the wooden backrest of the chair à la Reine towards the right edge of this pastel (fig. 21). Whereas on the left every hole in the wickerwork is perceptible, and the foreshortening of the curved backrest is articulated with light and shadow, on the right there is only a barely differentiated colored surface that develops no body, indeed appears just as flat as the surface of the very real picture support. This strategy is even more striking in the lower part of the armrest (fig. 22). In contrast to the precisely imitated patterns in the lace and the translucent, delicate, flawless skin, here only a few parallel, unconnected reddish-brown strokes with thick chalk on a brown ground can be discerned. These parts are surprising, since Liotard seems to contradicthis own ideals of point de touches propagated so extensively in his treatise. What are we to make of these open areas? Marginal areas, certainly, but areas which do not pass unnoticed as soon as one approaches this pastel, lured by the admirable precision of its execution.

21

Detail with the back of the chair behind the lady from Jean-Étienne Liotard, The Breakfast (“Portrait d’une Dame prenant du Chocolat”; fig. 9)

22

Detail of the armrest of the chair from Jean-Étienne Liotard, The Breakfast (“Portrait d’une Dame prenant du Chocolat”; fig. 9)

In my opinion, this peculiarity, which is by no means unique to the Munich painting (the back of the chair in Liotard’s self-portrait in front of the easel is executed in the same way; fig. 6), can hardly be understood as a concession to those voices that propagated painting with touches.^[89] On the contrary, precisely such parts also have their purpose within Liotard’s understanding of painting: after all, it is only the contrast that causes the fini, his ideal of the closed illusion, to come into its own in full form. Only through the contrast between the detailed part of the chair back on the left and the quickly and cursorily sketched part on the right, indeed the merely sketched armrest at the bottom, does the exactness of the mimesis in other parts become discernible as such. In these sketched parts, Liotard presents (to use Didi-Huberman’s term) the “material cause” of his painting, i.e., brown pigment. The exposed, flat line art irritates the illusion and at the same time actually makes it work. It undermines the concept of the mimetic tableau in order to bring out Liotard’s special skill all the more effectively.^[90]

In short, though devoted to the ideal of a detailed mimesis that conceals the painter’s hand, Liotard devises effective strategies to not disappear as the author of his paintings. In doing so, he also escapes a reproach quickly levelled at all- too-smooth, uniformly closed painting at the time, i.e., that it appeared to be “licked”, léché, bland, cold, dry.^[91] Liotard leaves certain parts open in order to reveal the process of painting in a different way. With this, however, Liotard no less exposes the becoming of the illusion (the exécution, le faire) and the conditions of painting: the flatness of the picture support, from which he builds up the three-dimensionality of what is depicted, and the raw pigment from which he creates his “truthful” illusion. As Liotard reveals with these open areas: No less than La Tour’s vigorous brushwork that always received the highest praise from art critics, his finely detailed painting of the closed, immaculate, clean surfaces is based on a talent, a technical bravura, a sophisticated mastery that seeks its equal.

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at conferences in Munich, Wolfenbüttel, Braunschweig, and Paris. I would like to thank the organizers and participants for their productive comments and observations. My special thanks go to Elisabeth Hipp, whose Munich exhibition on pastel painting before 1800 encouraged me to reflect on a comparison of the pictorial concepts of La Tour and Liotard. I am also very grateful to the journal’s anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable comments and Jessica Hoffmann for the care taken with improving its English. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.