Discover Liotard and The Lavergne Family Breakfast

The second book in the “Discover” series, this illuminating study explores Liotard’s little-known The Lavergne Family Breakfast (1754), widely regarded as a pastel masterpiece
 
Jean-Etienne Liotard’s The Lavergne Family Breakfast, acquired by the National Gallery in 2019, is one of the Gallery’s most important eighteenth-century pictures and the artist’s largest and most ambitious pastel. Last exhibited in 1754, when Liotard brought the pastel from Lyon to London (an incredible feat in itself given the fragility of pastel), it has hardly been seen in public since. Exploring the pastel medium, Liotard’s itinerant career and the stories behind the objects he depicts, this catalogue puts Liotard and The Lavergne Family Breakfast in the spotlight.
 
Liotard was a flamboyant artist and unusually well travelled for his time, and his own journeys across the length and breadth of Europe are considered alongside the voyages implicit in the components of the still life: coffee, porcelain and sugar. This discussion allows much wider elements of social history and the histories of travel and trade to be woven into the book. This beautifully illustrated publication offers readers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth century and an accessible introduction to a particularly idiosyncratic and gifted artist.
 
Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
The National Gallery, London
(November 16, 2023–March 3, 2024)