Portrait de l'impératrice Marie-Thérèse d'Autriche

Liotard's pastel portrait of Maria Theresa from 1762, now in the Museum of Art and History in Geneva, was made when the empress was forty-five and had been ruling the Habsburg Empire for twenty-two years. By this date she was a grandmother, her eldest daughter Maria Anna having died young, and was navigating the complex relationship with her son Joseph II, who had been crowned co-regent in 1764. Geneva was Liotard's home city—he was born there in 1702 and returned periodically throughout his peripatetic career—and the Geneva museum holds the most significant collection of his work, including multiple self-portraits and key examples from each phase of his practice. The pastel medium was Liotard's most characteristic achievement: he brought to it a precision and delicacy of surface that no contemporary could match, and his portraits of the empress across three decades document her transformation from young queen to imperial matriarch.

Pastel on paper or vellum: a 1762 Liotard pastel of Maria Theresa shows his late mature technique—more economical than his earlier work but no less precise. The empress's mature face, with its characteristic Habsburg features, receives his most carefully observed treatment.