Pictures Around Cromer
The Lavergne Family Breakfast

Jean-Etienne Liotard

The Lavergne Family Breakfast (detail) Jean-Etienne Liotard, © National Gallery

The Lavergne Family Breakfast

Jean-Etienne Liotard

The Lavergne Family Breakfast can be found on Merchants’ Place

Jean-Etienne Liotard, The Lavergne Family Breakfast, 1754
Jean-Etienne Liotard, 1702 – 1789
The Lavergne Family Breakfast, 1754
Pastel on paper stuck down on canvas, 80 × 106 cm
Accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government from the estate of George Pinto and allocated to the National Gallery, 2019
© The National Gallery, London

The Lavergne Family Breakfast, 1754

Jean-Etienne Liotard

Pastel on paper stuck down on canvas, 80 × 106 cm

At breakfast, an elegantly dressed woman watches a little girl dip a biscuit into milky coffee. The girl wears paper curlers in her hair. Coffee and chocolate were exclusive and costly beverages in the eighteenth century; the porcelain and silverware they use were no less luxurious.

Read more at NationalGallery.org.uk

Jean-Etienne Liotard
Jean-Etienne Liotard’s Self-Portrait Laughing, c1770. Photograph: Bettina Jacot-Descombes/Musee d’art et d’histoire, Geneva

Jean-Etienne Liotard

Liotard was born in Geneva, and trained partly in Paris. He travelled widely and visited Rome, Constantinople, Vienna, Paris, London and Holland. From 1758 he was mainly resident in Geneva. He specialised in pastel, executing genre subjects and portraits.