Liotard & Marie-Antoinette (Marie-Eve Celio)

Geneva-born artist Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789) was one of the great portraitists of his time. Held in high regard by Empress Maria Theresa, he created numerous portraits of members of the Austrian imperial family, among them Archduchess Maria-Antonia (1755-1793), later Marie-Antoinette Queen-consort of France, and Emperor Franz I Stephan. A group of 11 portrait drawings showing members of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine are held today in the collection of Geneva's Musée d'art et d'histoire (MAH).

Liotard & Marie-Antoinette is published to coincide with an exhibition at the MAH. It is based on a unique interdisciplinary research project that combined conventional archival research with state-of-the art facial recognition technology and forensics, comparing historic paintings and drawings as well as modern digital images to identify with precision the individuals portrayed by Liotard.

The volume makes the findings of this fascinating dialogue between art historians, scholars of 18th-century history, and researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence and forensics accessible to a broader audience. It offers an unusually multifaceted view of Liotard's masterful drawings and an approach to the stories hidden within them that is equally exciting and novel.

Marie-Eve Celio-Scheurer is senior curator and head of the Graphic Arts Collection at the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva (MAH).

Catriona Seth is a professor of French literature at the University of Oxford and leads a research project on the correspondence of the French queen Marie-Antoinette at the Palace of Versailles Research Centre.