Portrait of a Man Holding a Book, Turned to the Right

Liotard was internationally famous in the mid-18th century for his incisive and resplendent pastel portraits,such as the Art Institute’s Portrait of Marthe-Marie Tronchin. This rare preliminary study of an unknown gentleman reveals some of the artist’s working method: he rubbed the back of the sheet of blue paper with a lush vermilion pastel, to trace and thus transfer the outlines of the figure onto another support.