Woman in Turkish Dress, Seated on a Sofa

This enigmatic composition of a beautiful, melancholic young woman in exotic dress exists in at least three versions, testimony to its popularity among Liotard’s patrons. The group has engendered a long-running debate among scholars over issues of dating, chronology, and the identity of the sitter. The Wrightsman pastel is closest to a smaller pastel on parchment in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva (1930-20). A larger version, also pastel on parchment, in which the ripped-up letter on the carpet is replaced by a vase of flowers, is in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-240). Finally, a singular treatment of the composition in oil paint, with a wall added to the sitter’s right, placing her in a corner, is accepted by Renée Loche, Marcel Roethlisberger, and Anne de Herdt but is considered a copy by Alastair Laing.[1] All are ultimately based on a lost red- and black-chalk drawing made by Liotard during his stay in the Levant (1738–42), known through a counterproof in the Louvre (RF 1388). Despite variations in size and coloring, all of the pastels closely follow the chalk drawing; Liotard added only the richly colored carpet and the still-life elements placed on it.

It is known from inscriptions on some of his drawings that Liotard occasionally drew local women in their native dress on his travels through Italy and Greece. The numerous drawings from his stay in the Ottoman Empire, however, are much more likely to depict European women or local non-Muslim women who would permit themselves to be drawn unveiled. Intriguingly, an inscription (although not in the hand of the artist) on the back of the frame of the Geneva pastel gives the name of the sitter as Mimica.[2] The composition presumably would have been considered simply as a genre scene were it not for the caption on a reproductive print—by Richard Houston, after the Rijksmuseum version—identifying the sitter as Mary Gunning, countess of Coventry (1732–1760), a legendary English beauty.[3] The whole group came to be referred to as portraits of the countess of Coventry until 1988, when Danielle Buyssens proposed that only the Amsterdam version portrayed the countess, while the rest reused the composition but depicted other sitters,[4] a theory accepted by de Herdt in 1992. Alastair Laing rejected this idea later in 1992, when he pointed out that the Liotard pastels much more closely resemble one another than they do any known portrait of Mary Gunning and that it was common practice for print publishers to add apocryphal names of celebrated figures as captions to images to enhance sales.[5] Indeed, many of Liotard’s exotic genre scenes exist in multiple versions produced for the European market, whereas he typically invented new poses for each portrait sitter.

The pose, with its echoes of Dürer’s Melancholia, and the still-life elements, like the mirror, that are associated with vanitas subjects, have led some scholars to see in Liotard’s composition an eighteenth-century interpretation of Melancholy.[6] While such symbols were undoubtedly consciously employed by Liotard, the narrative touch of the torn-up letter and the sitter’s wistful gaze would have summoned up in Enlightenment viewers not so much the abstract concept of melancholy but the pervasive fictional treatments of romance and intrigue set in the harem that were found in contemporary fiction, theater, and art.[7]

Although Liotard’s early training included miniature painting and printmaking, in the technique of pastel he seems to have been self-taught, and the porcelain-like polish he achieved in his surfaces was without precedent. In the New York and Geneva variants of Woman in Turkish Dress, Liotard unified the composition by limiting his palette to pearly gray whites, turquoise, and brick red, achieving an exquisite balance of sumptuously patterned fabric with the quasi-immaterial expanse of empty wall. The Amsterdam version is in a different palette, emphasizing the blue and the white and reducing the role of red, though it is, at least to some degree, unfinished, as noted by Duncan Bull.[8] Loche and Roethlisberger in 1978, followed by de Herdt in 1992, have all assigned the Geneva version a date of about 1750 and the Amsterdam version a slightly later date of 1752–54. The Wrightsman version would logically fall between those two dates; it follows the composition of the Geneva pastel (including the torn-up letter), yet in certain localized areas gives the appearance of being unfinished. Specifically, the parallel pleats in the white fabric just below the sitter’s left hand, the red flowers on the cushion against the wall, the line distinguishing the wall from the floor on the left side of the composition, and the woman’s shadow on the wall are all treated more summarily in the New York version than in the Geneva pastel. Small areas that give the appearance of being less than fully realized, it should be emphasized, are characteristic of Liotard’s working method and are common in his pastel oeuvre. Most notable in its absence here is the woman’s shadow against the wall, an important element in the Geneva composition, functioning like a phantom companion, emphasizing both her solitary condition and the other for whom she presumably pines.

[2018; adapted from Stein 2005]

[1] Renée Loche and Marcel Roethlisberger, L’opera completa di Liotard, Milan, 1978, p. 101, no. 127; Anne de Herdt, Dessins de Liotard: Suivi du catalogue de l'eouvre dessiné. Exh. cat., Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva. Paris, 1992, p. 134 no. 68; and Alastair Laing, "Geneva and Paris: Liotard," Burlington Magazine 134 (November 1992), p. 749.
[2] Loche and Roethlisberger transcribe the inscription as "Mimica pastel peint / Pastel de psse Darmstat / Jean Etienne Liotard 1749," suggesting that the Geneva pastel may have been made for the princess Caroline de Hesse-Darmstadt. The year 1749 would predate Liotard’s stay in London. See Loche and Roethlisberger 1978, p. 101, no. 126.
[3] Herdt 1992, p. 136. The mezzotint is illustrated in Duncan Bull, with the assistance of Tomas Macsotay Bunt, Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789), Zwolle, 2002, p. 26.
[4] Danielle Buyssens, Peintures et pastels de l’ancienne école genevoise, XVIIe–début XIXe siècle, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, 1988, no. 184.
[5] Laing 1992, p. 749. Duncan Bull concurred in 2002; see Bull 2002, p. 26.
[6] This reading, first advanced by Yvonne Boerlin, is cited in Herdt 1992, p. 136.
[7] See Ali Behdad, "The Eroticized Orient: Images of the Harem in Montesquieu and His Precursors," Stanford French Review 13 (Fall–Winter 1989), pp. 109–26; Julia V. Douthwaite, Exotic Women: Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Régime France, Philadelphia, 1992; and Perrin Stein, "Exoticism as Metaphor: Turquerie in Eighteenth-Century French Art" (Ph.D. dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1997).
[8] Bull 2002, pp. 23, 25.

by descent to E. Peter Ecroyd, Scotland (until 1981; consigned to Bonhams, London, March 29, 1979, no. 55, ill., as "A Portrait of Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry seated resting her Head on her right Hand, to her right is her Work Basket, a Mirror and a Book, in the foreground on a Kirman Rug is a torn Letter," pastel on vellum, 23 1/2 x 19 in., unsold; sold to Harari & Johns); [Harari & Johns, London, 1981–82; sold through J. Barry Donahue to Atkins]; Charles Agee Atkins, New York (1982–83); [J. Barry Donahue Fine Arts, New York, 1983; sold to Wrightsman]; Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, New York (1983–his d. 1986); Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, New York (1986–d. 2019; cat., 2005, no. 60)

THIS WORK MAY NOT BE LENT, BY TERMS OF ITS ACQUISITION BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.

Horace Walpole. Anecdotes of Painting in England. London, 1828, vol. 4, p. 177 [1849 ed., vol. 3, p. 748 n. 2], mentions, among Liotard's "most capital works" acquired by the earl of Sefton from the earl of Harrington, one representing "Mademoiselle Gaucher, mistress of W. Anne Earl of Albemarle, in a Turkish dress, sitting," possibly this work.

Marcel Roethlisberger. Letter to Derek Johns. September 2, 1981, confirms attribution to Liotard; expresses uncertainty that the woman depicted is Mary Gunning and states that it requires further study.

Perrin Stein in The Wrightsman Pictures. Ed. Everett Fahy. New York, 2005, pp. 224–27, no. 60, ill. (color).

Neil Jeffares. "Jean Etienne Liotard." Dictionary of Pastellists Before 1800. London, 2006, no. J.49.13 [online edition, http://www.pastellists.com/Articles/Liotard1.pdf, accessed 09/26/2022], as "?La comtesse d'Hérouville, née Louise Gaucher, dite Lolotte (1724–1765), actrice, maîtresse du 2nd Earl of Albemarle, en turque".

Marcel Rœthlisberger and Renée Loche. Liotard: catalogue, sources et correspondance. Doornspijk, The Netherlands, 2008, vol. 1, pp. 462–63, no. 295; vol. 2, fig. 431 (color), notes that the British engraving after the pastel by Richard Houston suggests a date of 1753/55.

Duncan Bull. "Princess, Countess, Lover or Wife? Liotard's 'Lady on a Sofa'." Burlington Magazine 150 (September 2008), pp. 596–97, 599, 602, fig. 20 (color), dates it between 1749 and 1754/55, after the pastel in Geneva and before the one in Amsterdam; thinks it is probably a portrait, likely to be identified with the one mentioned by Horace Walpole of Mademoiselle Gaucher; believes that Richard Houston's mezzotint is based on this version of the composition.

Neil Jeffares. "Review of Rœthlisberger and Loche 2008." Burlington Magazine 151 (May 2009), p. 323, identifies it as the "Figure turque" exhibited at the 1751 Salon de Saint-Luc.

Hakim Bishara. "A Glorious Gift of European Artworks Is on Display at the Metropolitan Museum." Hyperallergic. November 19, 2019, ill. (color, installation view) [https://hyperallergic.com/528444/a-glorious-gift-of-european-artworks-is-on-display-at-the-metropolitan-museum/].

This work may not be lent, by terms of its acquisition by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.