A Dutch Girl at Breakfast

Jean-Étienne Liotard made his name with pastel, and oil paintings by him are rare, fewer than three dozen of them. He painted this one around 1756, during a stay in the Netherlands, and it is a Dutch picture in every sense. A young woman, identified as the painter's wife, pours coffee from a brass pot into a porcelain cup. Around her are the furnishings of a Dutch home, a woven mat, a little stove on the floor, a painted table and cabinet. On the wall hangs a church interior that seems to be Hendrick van Vliet's view of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, a nod to the Dutch painters of the century before. Liotard kept the picture until 1774, when he sold it at Christie's in London. The buyer was his old patron the Earl of Bessborough, and it stayed with that family for 242 years before the Rijksmuseum bought it in 2016.