Monsieur Levett et Mademoiselle Glavani

Monsieur Levett was an English merchant and traveller who lived in Constantinople, and Mademoiselle Glavani was a Levantine woman—possibly of Greek or Italian origin—also resident in the Ottoman capital during Liotard's years there from 1738 to 1742. This 1740 pastel on cardboard, now in the Louvre, is one of the most important documents of Liotard's Constantinople period, depicting two figures from the cosmopolitan expatriate community of the city in a scene of leisured sociability. The subject—two people in conversation over coffee or another hot drink—combines the domestic genre mode with orientalist subject matter in Liotard's most characteristic manner. The Louvre's acquisition of this work places it at the centre of the French national collection, recognised as both a major Liotard and a significant document of eighteenth-century French orientalism.

Pastel on cardboard: the two-figure composition in a domestic interior required Liotard to manage spatial depth, two distinct personalities, and the complex surface arrangements of Ottoman domestic furnishings simultaneously. Cardboard provides a firm support that absorbs pastel differently than paper.