Self-portrait

Liotard brought his beard back from the East and turned it into a trademark. This self-portrait, dated 1744, shows him in a brown fur cap with that long beard, the look he kept for more than a decade in rooms full of clean-shaven, powdered courtiers. He had recently come from years abroad and was working in Vienna for the empress Maria Theresa, and the bearded foreigner was a talking point wherever he went. He would not give up the beard until 1756, when the woman he was about to marry asked him to shave it off. The picture belongs to the Uffizi's long-running gallery of artists' self-portraits, so the face Florence keeps is Liotard dressed as the very character that made his name. A traveller writing in 1776 still remembered him first of all for that beard.