Jean Étienne Liotard Cross Stitch Kits & Patterns (4)
Jean Étienne Liotard (1702–1789) was the Swiss painter who wore Turkish robes in Geneva, kept a beard of magnificent proportions in an era when European gentlemen were clean-shaven, called himself the Turkish Painter, and produced some of the most technically astonishing pastel portraits of the 18th century — all of which tells you that he was either a genuine eccentric or a brilliant self-promoter, and the evidence suggests he was enthusiastically both at once. Born in Geneva to French Huguenot parents, he trained in Paris and Rome before spending four extraordinary years in Constantinople in the 1730s, an experience that changed him permanently and produced the Turkish costume, the beard, and a series of paintings of Ottoman life that were unlike anything European audiences had seen before.
He was, above everything else, a painter of surfaces — and the most technically gifted one of his era. His ability to render the texture of fabrics, the sheen of porcelain, the translucency of skin, and the softness of fur in pastel was so extraordinary that it bordered on the supernatural, and his contemporaries knew it. His most famous work, La Belle Chocolatière — a young maidservant carrying a tray with a cup of hot chocolate and a glass of water, painted in pastel with a simplicity and technical perfection that makes it look simultaneously easy and impossible — has been one of the most reproduced images in European art for two and a half centuries and is currently one of the best-known works in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie.
He travelled constantly and worked for the most distinguished clients in Europe — Maria Theresa of Austria, the Empress of Russia, the British royal family, the French court — painting them all with the same direct, unidealized honesty that was his signature. He had no interest in flattery. He painted what he saw, with astonishing skill, and left his sitters to decide whether they were pleased with the result. Most of them were, because what he saw was usually rather wonderful. He was still working at the age of 85 and was painting self-portraits into his final years — including one of the most honest and penetrating self-portraits ever made, in which an old man with an extraordinary beard looks back at the viewer with complete clarity and not a shred of vanity. In counted cross stitch, Liotard's extraordinary surface textures, luminous pastel palette, and beautifully observed figures translate into designs of unusual technical beauty and quiet magnificence. Browse our Jean Étienne Liotard cross stitch kit collection and choose a premium Liotard cross stitch kit or download a Jean Étienne Liotard cross stitch pattern instantly.
