The Lavergne Family Breakfast can be found on Merchants’ Place
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
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.