Jean-Etienne Liotard

Exhibited by Adam Williams Fine Art Ltd.

Material Oil on canvas

Dimensions 92 × 104 cm

Place of Creation Paris

Price Available upon inquiry

Status Vetted

About the Work

Extensive Catalogue Note available on request. Please contact [email protected].

Provenance

The artist: listed in his postmortem inventory drawn up in 1789 as his only History painting, no 177, valued at 561 florins.
Marie-Thérèse Liotard, his daughter (1763-1793);
Marie-Anne Françoise Liotard, Geneva;
Jean-Étienne Liotard-Crommelin, Amsterdam;
Miss M.A. Liotard, Amsterdam. Interestingly, the painting was not part of her important bequest to the Rijksmuseum in 1873.
J.W.R. Tilanus, Amsterdam, who had married Mrs J.V. Tilanus-Liotard.
Professor C.B. Tilanus, Amsterdam, valued at 40 florins in 1841.
His sale, Amsterdam 23-10 1934, lot 1034. Arranged by the broker C.W.L. Zwaal, the sale included other works by Liotard. The painting is marked as having gone to Zwaal Junior for 100 florins only, so it was possibly unsold.
Probably bought from the above by Amsterdam entrepreneur Bernard Berghaus (1896-1966), sometime between 1934 and 1941. He had married in 1934 Lily Claire, née Von Gontard. The painting is recorded in their collection in Berlin until 1941, when the couple moved to Switzerland.
Following Bernard Berghaus’ death in 1966, the painting passed to Lily Claire who brought it to New York where it hung in her Fifth Avenue apartment until circa 1980. It remained in her estate until recently.

Literature

E. Humbert, A. Revilliod and J.W.R. Tilanus, La vie et les œuvres de Jean-Étienne Liotard, Amsterdam 1897, no 110, reproduced.
Daniel Baud-Bovy, Peintres genevois du 18ème et du 19ème siècle, Première série : 1702-1817, 1903, p. 17
François Fosca, Liotard, 1702-1789, Paris 1928, p. 156
Louis Gielly, l’École genevoise de peinture, 1933, p. 194 and 1935, pp. 29, 34, 204.
Numa Trivas, les portraits de J. E. Liotard par lui-même, in Revue de l’art ancien et moderne, 1936, no 294
Adrien Bovy in the introduction to the catalogue of “Jean-Étienne Liotard, 1702-1789, Johann-Heinrich Füssli, 1741-1825”, Paris, April-June 1948, p. 11
Renée Loche and Marcel Roethlisberger, l’opera completa di Liotard, Classici dell’Arte, Milan 1978, pp 88-89, no 15, reproduced p. 88
Brian de Breffny, Irish Arts Review (1984-1987), Vol. 4, Summer 1987, p. 31
Renée Loche and Marcel Roethlisberger, Liotard: catalogue, sources et correspondance, Doornspijk, The Netherlands, 2008, p. 250, no. 31, reproduced fig. 32
Neil Jeffares,https://neiljeffares.wordpress.com/2016/01/02liotards-early-years-in-paris/ p. 3-8, reproduced p. 4