Life after death

This is not the biggest exhibition at Edinburgh and it will not be the best attended but it may be the most daring. While the main gallery at the Royal Scottish Academy, commandeered as usual for Festival season by the National Galleries of Scotland, hosts a glittering exhibition of David Bailey photographs, the lower galleries offer three small rooms of Jean-Etienne Liotard.

Who? You may well ask, because for anyone not schooled at the Courtauld, Liotard is likely to be as obscure as Bailey is recognisable. Drawing the two together in the same building is less of a leap than it might appear, however, for Liotard was also an eminent portraitist of his time, and, like Bailey, was himself a celebrity figure.

Liotard, who was born in Geneva in 1702, trained as a miniaturist, executing works of delightful delicacy in enamel or watercolour. He also produced capable, if unremarkable, oils and was an accomplished printmaker but he became renowned above all for his extraordinary pastel portraits.

Pastel is a problematic medium. Made by binding dry pigment with gum to form a stick of colour, it is a versatile but awkward tool that is usually best exploited in energetic drawings where its potential for expressive mark-making can flourish. Think Degas. Liotard took pastel in the other direction. Informed by his miniaturist experience, he coaxed his pastels into forms of the most exquisite smoothness. His pigments blend like soft paint with vivacious results; practical demonstrations of his stated belief in art as a mirror of nature.

‘Truth prevailed in all his works,’ said Horace Walpole, and the Edinburgh exhibition shows why Liotard became so sought after in the courts and society houses of 18th-century Europe. The portraits that leap from these dark purple walls are fascinating, vivid depictions of royalty, aristocracy and family.