A woman is teaching a child how to eat breakfast. They are seated at a small wooden table with a surface so polished you can see reflections of the metal coffee pot and porcelain tableware as the woman steadies the girl’s cup so she can dip a thick piece of bread into her milky coffee.
This is not just a civilised ritual but a civilising one: the child is being trained, just as her hair is disciplined with tight wrappings. This is Lyon, France, in 1754 and the pair taking their polite morning repast are enacting the new social style of the European cultural movement known as the Enlightenment. Inspired by the orderly “clockwork” universe described by Isaac Newton, this 18th-century ideology valued reason, sociability and manners. In Jean-Etienne Liotard’s masterpiece The Lavergne Family Breakfast, those values are expressed in the proper handling of fragile Japanese porcelain and the ability to dunk your bread without splashing yourself.
It’s a picture so good Liotard did it twice – first in pastels then, a decade later, in oil on canvas. Both versions hang side by side at the heart of this intriguing encounter with an artist few of us have even heard of. What is so special about this morning in 1754 that it needs to be so lovingly remembered?
Nothing, of course. That is the whole point. Liotard is asking you to slow down, stop, and simply see the beauty of ordinary moments in an ordinary day. It’s not just the socialising of a child we see but the calm of early morning, the glow of light on ceramic and metal and polished wood, the intent faces of the two coffee drinkers. Very average and very special.
The exhibition starts with an introduction to pastels. There’s a full box of antique pastel sticks from the early 1900s and a film of traditional pastel making in France. Invented in the Renaissance and hugely popular in the 1700s, pastel crayons hold powdered pigment in a waxy, chalky binding mixture that lets you “paint” by drawing: they don’t mix, so a professional needs hundreds of different coloured crayons.
This delicate, precise medium perfectly suited the reasonable, consciously civilised ethos of the Enlightenment and Liotard’s mastery of it made him a star across Europe and beyond. He was born in Geneva in Switzerland, a city that by the 1700s was so Enlightened it put a classical temple facade on its cathedral. It was a cosmopolitan melting pot, a home from home for intellectuals such as the historian Edward Gibbon.
Liotard took his Swiss spirit of sweet reason with him along with his pastel box in a life of travel and curiosity. After meeting an English aristocrat friend in the street one day, he spontaneously agreed to join him on a trip to Constantinople, where he grew a beard in Muslim style and stayed several years. His portraits of women living in the Ottoman empire, who may be western travellers or Jewish residents, are full of character and autonomy. Signora Marigot, depicted in Smyrna in 1738, stands with elegant swagger, hand on hip, a necklace between her breasts.
A miniature self-portrait shows Liotard in profile in Turkish dress. It once belonged to the 18th-century art collector Horace Walpole, for Liotard was a star when he came back from Constantinople to cannily set up shop in London, where portraits were in demand in a bustling commercial art world. British artists envied his high prices. Is there an Ottoman influence on his pastel portraits? Liotard’s precision is definitely reminiscent of Turkish court miniaturists. His pastel portrait of Eva Maria Garrick, wife of the actor David Garrick, captures her thoughtful face as she turns away from the artist, a pale, silvery presence recorded with warmth.
Liotard’s world is global and optimistic, calm and coherent. But then a crack in the coffee cup appears. A wall text beside a beautiful still life of a porcelain tea set, including a bowl full of sugar, points out that sugar at the time was produced by enslaved people, and Liotard and his clients would have known this.
I have no idea how to use this information, looking at such delicate, lovely works. The civilised ritual portrayed by Liotard in The Lavergne Family Breakfast, in which there is a well-stuffed sugar bowl, symbol of the 18th-century European good life, on the table by the coffee pot, would not have existed in this form without slavery.
It makes this an awkward exhibition. The brutal facts don’t help you see this gentle art any more clearly. Rather, you feel bad for enjoying it. Liotard suddenly slips away, the fragile beauty of his pastels lost in the bloodstained Atlantic. This may be right, but it leaves a question mark over the very purpose of museums. One wall text can obliterate a show. I’m not complaining. I’m just depressed. That crack in the porcelain is only going to get wider.
