... In Paris, before his British stay, he had showed his skill at conveying character in his portraits of David Garrick (a quicksilver actor, so often painted, but so hard to capture) and his calm and easy-natured wife Eva-Maria. These paved the way for smart introductions, including one to Augusta, Princess of Wales. Liotard’s pastel showed her sturdily open, free of swank, and he went on to make equally frank portraits of her nine children, from the sixteen-year-old George, affable in his garter robes, to the six year-old Louisa Anne. Surely this is the most poignant of royal portraits—a frail child with pale lashes and nervous, open-eyed gaze, made even more fragile by the huge chair and too-big dress which uncovers a pale nipple, a touchingly un-royal detail. These intimate, candid images were private portraits, carried about like family photographs. They stop being “personages” and become people, like the servant or the artist’s own daughter. And perhaps the portraits’ eerie power comes partly from our own hindsight—we know the subjects’ fate while they remain innocently unaware. Louisa-Anne, for example, would die of tuberculosis at the age of nineteen. And on his second long visit to Vienna in 1762, when Liotard made drawings of eleven of the twelve children of the Empress Maria Theresa, he caught another doomed princess, the seven-year-old Marie Antoinette. Here she sits, with her fashionable curled hair and a rose-colored dress smothered in bows, poised and assured, casting a sidelong glance as she unwinds a thread for sewing. [http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/09/04/liotard-unexpected-likeness/]