Still Life: Tea Set

Chinese porcelain and tea-drinking were the rage of fashionable Europe when Jean-Étienne Liotard began painting tea and coffee sets in the last two decades of his life, as age, changes in taste and his own convictions cut the demand for the pastel portraits that had been his specialty. Only five of these tea pieces are known today; here a tray is set with six cups and saucers, a teapot, a sugar bowl and the disarray of a tea-time just finished — the whole composed with the same cool, exacting observation Liotard brought to his sitters. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.