Curator’s Introduction: Discover Liotard and the Lavergne Family Breakfast

Join Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, Acting Curator of Later Italian, Spanish and French Paintings, for an introduction to our free exhibition, ‘Discover Liotard and The Lavergne Family Breakfast’.
 
‘The Lavergne Family Breakfast’ is one of Swiss painter Jean-Etienne Liotard’s largest and most ambitious works in pastel. Highly unusually, Liotard returned to the same subject 20 years after he had painted it, and made an exact replica in oil. 
 
For the first time in 250 years, this exhibition reunites the two versions. With the pastel and oil works side by side, this exhibition is a rare opportunity to compare the difference in technique and effect between the two.
 
The exhibition also showcases the raw materials used to make pastels as well as drawings, paintings and miniatures that seek to bring Liotard to life.