Portrait of Maria Adelaide of France in Turkish-style clothes

In 1753 the smart thing at the French court was to be painted à la turque, in a loose silk robe and turban, reclining on a divan, playing at an Ottoman ease most sitters knew only from prints and travellers' tales. The young woman here is Marie-Adélaïde, one of Louis the Fifteenth's daughters, and Liotard shows her stretched along a sofa in exactly that costume, lost in a book. It is a strikingly relaxed way to portray a princess. In place of a throne and formal robes there is a girl reading, the flowered gown and layered headdress set down with his usual patience for cloth. The pose runs on the diagonal, informal, as though we had walked in on her. The painting reached the Uffizi in 1932, and it is an old inscription on the back that tells us which of the king's daughters this is.