Enfilade

Liotard Tome Reviewed at ‘Apollo Magazine’

Posted in books, reviews by Editor on May 2, 2010

From Apollo Magazine:

Marcel Roethlisberger and Renée Loche, Liotard: catalogue, sources et correspondance, 2 vols. (Doornspijk: Davaco, 2008), ISBN 907028808, £503.

Reviewed by Robert Oresko.

On 30 September 1762, 24-year-old Bostonian John Singleton Copley wrote to Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789), by then aged nearly 60, whom he had previously met in London, asking for help in procuring ‘a sett of the best Swiss Crayons for drawing of Portraits’. Liotard’s cosmopolitanism was a hallmark of his career as an artist, but a request from pre-revolutionary Boston indicates how widely his fame had spread. This telling anecdote emerges from the section – of nearly 150 pages – of Liotard’s letters in the second volume of Marcel Roethlisberger and Renée Loche’s “Liotard,” a monumental, archivally-based study of the Genevan-born artist’s life and work.

Over 900 folio pages of text, spread over two volumes, document the career of one of the greatest of painters in pastel and establish
his position as a key figure in 18th-century cultural life. . . .

The full review can be found here»

One Response

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  1. Bryan J. Wolf said, on May 3, 2010 at 12:46 am

    John Singleton Copley’s 1762 letter to Liotard requesting “a sett of the best Swiss Crayons” preceded the New England artist’s first visit to London by 12 years. Copley did not arrive in London until 1774. This means, alas, that Copley had not “previously met [Liotard] in London,” as the review, based on the Liotard catalogue, suggests.


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