Portret van een Heer.

This 1779 portrait of a Dutch gentleman, companion piece to the elderly woman portrait also in Museum Gouda from the same year, reflects Liotard's continued activity in the Dutch Republic in his late career. Museum Gouda's holding of two pendant portraits from 1779 suggests these may have been commissioned as a pair—husband and wife, perhaps, or two members of the same prominent Gouda family. The Dutch Republic in 1779 was experiencing the tensions that would eventually lead to the Patriot Revolution of the 1780s, and Liotard's portraits of Dutch bourgeois citizens document the governing class of a society on the verge of significant political transformation. Liotard, then in his late seventies, brought the same precise, unpretentious directness to these late Dutch portraits as he had brought to his earliest works—a consistency of vision that defines his practice across six decades.

Oil on canvas in late Liotard: the gentleman's face receives the careful individual observation that is Liotard's hallmark, while Dutch bourgeois dress of 1779 is recorded with documentary precision. The technique is economical without being hurried.