Marie Congnard-Bathailhy, Jean-Etienne Liotard, 1757
This touching and intimate portrait was made towards the end of Liotard’s first sojourn in the Netherlands. The sitter was the 65-year old grandmother of Liotard’s Dutch bride Marie Fargues, a Huguenot like himself, whom he married in Amsterdam in 1756. The virtuoso rendering of the sitter’s black lace pellerine has earned her the sobriquet ‘la dame aux dentelles’.