Woman Getting Ready to Meet the Day by Ramon Casas i Carbo (Spanish painter, 1866-1932)

It is rainy and dark. These kinds of days are slow getting started. This feeling is elegantly captured by 19th-century Spanish painter Ramon Casas i Carbo in this series.

Ramon Casas i Carbo (Spanish painter, 1866-1932)

Ramon Casas i Carbo (Spanish painter, 1866-1932)

Ramon Casas i Carbo (Spanish painter, 1866-1932)

Ramon Casas i Carbo (Spanish painter, 1866-1932)

Ramon Casas i Carbo (Spanish painter, 1866-1932)

Ramon Casas i Carbo (Spanish painter, 1866-1932)

Ramon Casas i Carbo (Spanish painter, 1866-1932) Interior

Ramon Casas i Carbo (Spanish painter, 1866-1932)

These simple, elegant paintings are not typical of the work of Ramon Casas i Carbó (1866-1932). He was a Catalan artist. During a turbulent time in his native Barcelona, he was a leading portraitist, painting the intellectual, economic, & political elite of Barcelona, Paris, Madrid, & beyond. He was also known for painting less elitist crowd scenes ranging from the audience at a bullfight to an assembly for an execution to a group of rioters in the Barcelona streets. Also a graphic designer, his posters & postcards helped to define the Catalan art movement known as modernisme. By the 1920s, Casas had fallen far away from the avant-gardiste tendencies of his youth. His work from this later period looks like it came from an academic painter of an earlier time than his work of the 1890s.

Ramon Casas i Carbo (1866-1932) Self-Portrait

The Radiant Portraits of Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909)

Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) Marie Kroyer The Artist's Wife 1891


Peder Severin Krøyer (1851-1909), known as P.S. Krøyer, was a Norwegian-Danish painter. He is one of the best known of the Skagen Painters, a community of Danish & Nordic artists who worked in Skagen, Denmark, especially during the late 1800s. On a trip to Paris in 1888, he ran into Marie Martha Mathilde Triepcke, whom he had known in Copenhagen. They married in 1889, at her parents' home in Germany. Marie Krøyer, also a painter, became associated with the Skagen community, & was often featured in Krøyer's paintings. The couple had 1 child, a daughter named Vibeke, born in January, 1895, but divorced in 1905.


Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) Marie Kroyer 1889


Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) Artist's Wife Marie


Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) Marie, Ravello 1890


Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) Nina


Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) Artist's Wife Marie


Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) Artist and Wife Marie


Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) Portrait of the Artist's Wife Marie

Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) The Artist's Wife 1892


Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) Artist Anna Ancher 1886


Peder Severin Krøyer (Norwegian-born Danish artist, 1851-1909) with his wife Marie

Swiss artist Jean-Etienne Liotard 1702-1789 either adored chocolate or the chocolate serving girl

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789)  The Chocolate Girl 1743


Food historian Patricia Bixler Reber tells us in her blog Researching Food History - Cooking and Dining, that chocolate is made from the seeds of the cacao tree.  Seed pods were picked, opened, & fermented for a few days, as they dried.  In the 18th-century, the beans were roasted in a pan, pot, or roaster on the hearth.  The shells were removed leaving the usable chocolate "nibs."  The nibs were ground down into a paste by using a stone or steel metate & mano or in a choclate mill.   Further grinding, conching, resulted in a smooth texture.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss artist, 1702-1789)  Madame Liotard and her Daughter


Marylander Pat Reber shared 2 primary sources from the 1700s explaining chocolate preparation.  "The Cacao...a Seed...when they have been divested of their Shells by Fire, and are afterwards peeled, and roasted in a Bason, before a moderate Fire, they are pounded in a very hot Mortar. The Americans bruise them with an Iron Cylinder, on a flat Stone made very hot; they are then formed into a Paste, which is afterwards boiled with Sugar; and this is called plain Chocolate. But if it is to be enriched with a fine Odour, four Pounds of this Paste, and three of powdered Sugar, are worked together in a Mortar, or on some Stone..."  (Spectacle de la Nature. Noël Antoine Pluche. 1766)

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss artist, 1702-1789)  Le Petit Déjeuner


"The Cacao seeds are roasted like coffee...When the kernels are perfectly purified, they are pounded in a mortar of heated iron over burning charcoal, and thus reduced to a coarse paste, which is set to cool on a marble slab. A second rolling is bestowed with a steel cylinder on a smooth freestone, and as soon as the paste becomes sufficiently smooth, it is mixed with sugar in a hot basin and poured into tin moulds..."  (The Encyclopædia of Geography, Hugh Murray. Phila: 1837)

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) La Chocolatiere c 1744

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) La Chocolatiere

WOMEN by Jean-Etienne Liotard 1702-1789

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss artist, 1702-1789)  Mademoiselle Louise Jacquet

In 2006, the Frick Collection presented the works of Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789), this artist's first in North America and one of his few anywhere.  The review in the New York Times asked, "Liotard? He's a specialty item now, but in his era, Enlightenment Europe, he was a smash success. Even then he was seen as a maverick, a figure of contradictions. He was Swiss, but interesting; he was a stone-cold realist in an age of rococo frills. He had ultra-fancy patrons — princes, a pope, Madame de Pompadour — but a provincial education. He was a vigorous mover; he rarely stayed in one place for long. But he wasn't a shaker: he sparked no new style, inspired no disciples.

 Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss artist, 1702-1789) La Belle Lectrice

 "His apartness was as much circumstantial as personal. He was born in Calvinist Geneva, far from a Parisan art world dominated by the fashions, politics and hierarchies of the Royal Academy. Rather than study history painting, the prestige genre, he started out as a portrait miniaturist, steady-income work. In a great age of oil paint, he was partial to pastel. But he also mastered enamel work, printmaking, watercolor and drawing, a true high-low mix.

 Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss artist, 1702-1789) Princess Louisa

"He had itchy feet. He worked in Paris for a while, traveled with a French patron to Italy, then with a British sponsor to Constantinople. Little of the art he did there survives, though the show includes...one of a European lady in elaborate native dress. Other artists might have made her exotic; under Liotard's clinical, detail-obsessed gaze she's an anthropological specimen.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789 Empress Maria Theresa Archduchess of Austria

"...the large self-portrait, known as "Liotard With a Beard." Beards were out of fashion in 18th-century Europe. He had grown his while in Turkey. Long, full and unruly, it was a bold cosmetic statement and, it turned out, a public relations coup. Heads turned when he walked the streets of Paris. People called him the Turkish painter. Commissions piled up.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Charlotte Marie Cazenove 1765

"He kept moving. He went to Vienna, where he established a working friendship with the Empress Maria Theresa. It says something about Liotard's character that he maintained long-term contact with this particular court, the most austere and least corrupt in Europe. And it says something about his gifts that the empress gave him the commissions she did.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Jean-Etienne Liotard (1758-1822) 1760

"Other artists got to do big-gun official portraits, the kind that turned a pawky prince into Adonis or Zeus. Maria Theresa asked Liotard to draw portraits of her children, intimate pictures that a fond mother could carry on her travels. She had quite a brood, 16 children in all.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Johanna Gabrielle, archiduchesse d'Autriche (1750-1762) 1762

"Whatever Liotard was paid for these pictures, it was too little. He poured every ounce of his talent into them. Each seamlessly blends several mediums: black and red chalk, pencil, pastel and watercolor. Details are executed with a watchmaker's precision. To give the figures a naturalistic glow, Liotard colored the reverse side of each thin sheet of paper. Marie-Antoinette is bathed in a rosiness that you sense rather than actually see.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Lady Charles Tyrell (1705-1778) 1746

"The Vienna stays were harmonious interludes in larger journeys. Were Liotard working today, he would live in airports, waiting for the next flight to Venice, Milan, Darmstadt, Lyon. He spent two years in London, then two in Holland, where, at 54, he married. He shaved off his beard for the wedding. He didn't need it anymore. He was rich and famous, and ready at last to be a good Swiss householder.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Madame Pierre Lullin (1659-1762) 1762

"The portraits kept coming, of his growing family, of Genevan merchants and intellectuals. They are delightful, not just for their candor and skill but for their variety...and you discover that there was absolutely nothing he could not do with pastel.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Lady with a Jonquil 1750-59

"But his kind of realism was veracity, not verismo. Facts were his strength; truth of observation his goal. He delivers breathtaking flourishes, but always contained within solid forms. For him exactitude is the rule; but this means flaws are unavoidable, his sitters' and his own.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Maria Amalia, archiduchesse d'Autriche (1746-1804) 1762

"Is his the face of the Enlightenment? Yes, and the Enlightenment at its best. It speaks of no sanctity, no pretension, no Fall, no fear, no ideology, no "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world." It says: The world is all right, period. And all wrong. All everything. And the artist — worker, entertainer, recorder — is happy to be here, wherever here is. For Liotard it seems to have been pretty much everywhere.

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Louise-Marguerite Marcet (1764-1788) 1785

"It is a concrete sense of hereness that makes his art refreshing. It makes every picture feel as if he approached it as his first and the last picture; as if no picture had a memory of any other; and as if each was an experiment, a flier to who knew where. Some took off; some didn't. He didn't fret over "great." He moved on to see what was next. He was wise that way, cool that way, modern that way."

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Maria Antonia (Marie-Antoinette) archiduchesse d'Autriche (1755-1793) 1762

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Madame Denis-Joseph La Live 1759

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Maria Christine, archiduchesse d'Autriche (1742-1798) 1762

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Madame Francois Tronchin (1713-1788) 1758

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Maria Caroline, archiduchesse d'Autriche (1752-1814) 1762

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Maria Elisabeth, archiduchesse d'Autriche (1743-1809) 1762

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Madame Jean-Louis Maisonnet (1721-1812) 1755

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Maria Josepha, archiduchesse d'Autriche (1751-1767) 1762

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Madame Jeanne-Marie Liotard (1726-1789) 1752

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Marie Anna (Marianne), archiduchesse d'Autriche (1738-1789) 1762

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Madame Marc Liotard de la Servette  (1783-1827) 1775

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Madame Paul Girardot de Vermenoux (1739-1789) 1760-1770

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Marie-Therese Liotard (1763-1793) 1779

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Madame Sophie de France (1734-1782) 1750-51

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Maria Fredericke van Reede-Athlone at age 7

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Marie Jeanne Liotard (1761-1813) 1779

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Marie-Therese d'Autriche (1717-1780)

Jean-Etienne Liotard (Swiss-French artist, 1702-1789) Maria Josepha of Saxony, Dauphine of France.

See Jean-Étienne Liotard, the Unrelenting Eye of the Enlightenment by Holland Cotter New York Times June 23, 2006