Figure 5.7 JeanÉtienne Liotard: Monsieur Levett and Mademoiselle Helene Glavany in Turkish
Costume, oil on card, 24.6 × 36.4 cm, c. 1740. Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Source: akgimages/Erich Lessing.These images formed part of the discourse of luxury and celebrated indirectly European commercial pre
eminence (Bindman, 2008, 16; Bindman, Boucher and Weston, 2011b, 79–83). Zoffany’s British portrait
of Queen Charlotte with her two sons follows implicitly in this tradition (Pointon, 1993, 163). It
overflows with Chinese motifs, Turkish carpets and costumes, as well as luxury goods from Germany and
Flanders, that underline the Queen’s possession of the highest quality goods from all over the world. Such
positive, emotive representations of overseas trade and exotic wealth, expressed even in the children’s
costumes, could serve simultaneously to express and justify an imperialist mentality, “ownership” of
foreign cultures and the following of fashion (Solkin, 1993, 195). Augustus the Strong of Saxony
commissioned Turkish subjects from Johann Samuel Mock (1687–1737).
In paintings such as Boucher’s Odalisque, the east became the loosest possible excuse for the
representation of erotic subjects on the general theme of the courtesan or the harem – the latter made more
familiar to westerners through works such as A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the
Ottoman Empire (1709) by Aaron Hill (1685–1750). Turkish dress often allowed western sitters to
expose more of their bodies in a way that was prevented by conventional fashions. Liotard, who had also