Empress Maria Theresia

The 1744 pastel of Empress Maria Theresa in the Museum Mayer van den Bergh in Antwerp—dated three years before the Rijksmuseum copper portrait—captures her at twenty-seven, when she had been ruling for four years and the War of the Austrian Succession was still ongoing. The Museum Mayer van den Bergh, founded on the collection of Fritz Mayer van den Bergh who died in 1901, is best known for Bruegel's Dulle Griet but holds a varied collection spanning centuries. An early Liotard pastel of Maria Theresa in Antwerp, then part of the Austrian Netherlands, connects geographically to the Habsburg territories Liotard served. This early portrait shows the empress younger and perhaps more visibly burdened by the military crises of her opening years—a different face than the consolidated authority of his 1762 portraits.

Pastel on a support appropriate for Liotard's mid-career technique: at 1744 he had returned from Constantinople and was developing his full mature pastel mastery. The young empress's face receives his most careful blended modelling, creating the characteristic soft luminosity of his finest pastel work.