From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Maurice-Quentin de La Tour has a creased blue cap perched jauntily atop his shaved head. He leans his elbow familiarly on a stone roundel. Known in French as an oeil de boeuf or ‘bull’s eye’ window, this illusionistic device visually separates our world from his. In the picture, the artist grins, revealing a row of white teeth and, with his index finger, directs our attention to something we cannot immediately identify; the background appears to be blank. Self-Portrait with Index Finger was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1737. It marked La Tour’s debut as one of the Academy’s provisional members and the beginning of his illustrious career.
In recent years, La Tour (1704–88) has been the subject of much research, notably the catalogue raisonné published online by Neil Jeffares in 2022. Now a lavishly illustrated French-language publication by Xavier Salmon offers a fresh opportunity to pore over some 300 of the artist’s works in detail. Naturally, this includes Self-Portrait with Index Finger, which became widely known after its first public appearance thanks to several further versions by La Tour himself, as well as numerous copies and reproductions. In the years since, it has been the subject of much anecdote, speculation and questioning. For example, what is the artist pointing at? The range of suggestions touch on different aspect of the popular mythology surrounding the artist. Denis Diderot claimed that the gesture was an elaborate practical joke against La Tour’s younger rival, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1715–83). This would fit with what we know about La Tour’s notorious competitiveness, but Diderot got his dates wrong: Perronneau did not make his first appearance at the Salon until 1746. Others have asserted that La Tour is depicting himself as Democritus, the ‘laughing philosopher’ of the ancient world. Certainly, La Tour aspired to the title of artist-philosopher – making him, in the less complimentary words of Michael Levey, ‘a sort of homespun Voltaire of portraiture, lively, opinionated, satiric, and sometimes rude’.
Self-Portrait with Index Finger (c. 1770), Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: © Michel Urtado/RMN-Grand Palais/Dist. Photo SCALA, Florence
However, whether La Tour is laughing at us, with us, or at his rivals, on the most basic level his painted pointing finger calls our attention to the powdery surface from which it emerges. Like all the artist’s known works, Self-Portrait with Index Finger was created using pastel, the dry pigment medium with which he is now synonymous. It may be part of the picture’s bravado that the surface to which its subject points is grey, underlining his ability to transmogrify nondescript dust into the face of a laughing man. For, as this bold self-portrait suggests, 18th-century pastel was a medium rich in possibility. It was also young, having emerged as recently as the end of the previous century. Although he was far from the only pastel painter working in Paris in the 18th century (Jeffares estimates the total number, by the 1750s, to be in the order of 200–300), over the following three decades La Tour exhibited more works in pastel than any other artist and appeared at every annual Salon except in 1765. In the words of the art theorist Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne, writing in 1746, ‘M. de la Tour has bestowed a vogue and a creditability [on pastel painting…] by the marvels he has created.’
All these ‘marvels’ were portraits, the genre which in France, by the middle of the century, reigned supreme – much to the regret of La Font de Saint-Yenne, who complained of the ‘mass of obscure men, without name, without reputation, even without physiognomy’ exhibited at the Salon each year, to the detriment of worthier efforts in history painting. La Font de Saint-Yenne notwithstanding, a glance through La Tour’s oeuvre reveals a panorama of contemporary French life. Exhibited the year after his first self-portrait, in 1738, Anne-Marguerite Perrinet de Longuefin, Madame Rouillé depicts the daughter of a wine merchant from Sancerre glancing up from her book. Lines of bold red crayon around her chin, neck and wrist indicate the reflection on her white skin of her red fur-trimmed velvet cloak; her florid cheeks, on the other hand, suggest blood pulsing beneath them. More than a decade later, La Tour painted the fermier-général Gaspard Grimod de la Reynière. This prosperous tax farmer looks affably out at the viewer, though his left hand remains firmly wedged into his elaborately frogged jacket in the standard gesture of leadership and gentility. As time went on, La Tour’s sitters came from across an increasingly broad spectrum. Several portraits of the royal family were among the 15 pastels he sent to the Salon of 1748; in 1753, he exhibited pictures of Louis de Silvestre, then director of the Royal Academy; the dramatist Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée; the singer Pietro Manelli, and up-and-coming writers and intellectuals including Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. By this point, the rise of French ‘celebrity’ culture was such that even La Font de Saint-Yenne had been forced to concede that certain portraits could be edifying to offer the public, including those of ‘good kings and virtuous queens’ and illustrious figures from the arts and literature. But if La Tour’s oeuvre comprises a portrait gallery of contemporary Paris, it is equally significant that he chose pastel with which to create it.
Anne-Marguerite Perrineau de Longuefin, Madame Rouillé (c. 1738), Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. Frick Collection, New York (promised gift). Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.
Pastels are assembled from powdered pigments mixed with a filler (in the 18th century, sometimes chalk, plaster or clay) and a binder (often gum arabic, tragacanth or milk) before being shaped and dried. They can be applied to paper (La Tour’s preference), but also vellum or parchment, and any of these could also be mounted on to a canvas on a stretcher. Compared to oil paint, they are easy to use; they certainly generate significantly less mess. Working with pastels, it is easy to create a coloured image quickly, but the paintings, once completed, remain provisional. Since pastel particles never fully adhere to the paper, a touch, or even a breath, will disperse them again. For this reason, in the 18th century, completed paintings were immediately glazed. As La Font de Saint-Yenne put it, the ‘volatile beauty of crayons [is] as fragile as the glass which protects them’. As a result, a key factor in the sudden proliferation of pastels at the time was the widening availability of plate glass. Another was increasing confidence with the manufacturing process. Different pigments react in different ways to binding and drying, and since pastel colours cannot be mixed, a functional set of crayons has to include not only a range of colours, but also of tonalities, thus vastly inflating the required numbers. Caroline Louise of Baden, an accomplished amateur student of the Swiss pastellist Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–89), is known to have bought a ready-made box containing more than 200 crayons.
It was therefore possible for pastel to emerge as an independent medium only after it was technically possible to create sets of sticks that would behave in a predictable and homogenous manner every time, and then to protect the results through glazing. By 1800, pre-prepared pastels were commercially available in France both in Paris and the provinces. It is likely that the pastel maker ‘Mademoiselle Charmeton’ was deploying some licence in asserting in the Mercure de France that La Tour (among others) used her ‘excellent crayons’ for preference. The master of pastel does, generally, seem to have preferred to purchase sticks ready-made – but, being a relentless experimenter, he probably did dabble in making and testing his own. In fact, La Tour’s zeal for tinkering was such that he notoriously destroyed several of his finished paintings in a fruitless attempt to improve them.
Pastel as practised by La Tour was therefore the latest in painting technology. However, La Tour was not the first to adopt it. In the hands of its earliest major French practitioner, Joseph Vivien (1657–1734), the airy dust of pastel was weighed down by baroque allegory and drapery. The medium was popularised for a new generation by the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757), who made a triumphant visit to Paris at the invitation of the banker and art collector Pierre Crozat in 1720–21. Carriera had built her career on head-and-shoulders portraits of visitors to Venice, who were attracted by the prospect of an easily transportable souvenir and a pleasingly brief sitting. Writing about another pastellist in 1727, the French letter-writer Charlotte Aïssé recalled: ‘It is a three-hour affair […] you lean on a table where the painter works; that allows you to amuse yourself seeing the drawing, and to make sure that you do not have a disagreeable appearance.’ Speed was increasingly prized during this period for artistic reasons as well. Around 1769, Jean-Honoré Fragonard produced in oils a series of ‘fantasy figures’, several of which have labels on the back asserting that they were painted in just an hour. However, Aïssé’s description of mutual enjoyment in the creation of a pastel evokes a sense of relaxation that accorded well with the holiday mood of tourists on the Grand Canal, but also with something in the air in La Tour’s Paris.
Portrait of Madame Anne-Jeanne Cassaná de Mondonville, née Boucon (1708–80) (c. 1752). Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. Art Institute of Chicago
From the beginning of the Regency in 1715, French cultural life had become increasingly decentralised, with royal patronage giving way to the efforts of private individuals (such as Crozat) and aesthetic judgements devolving to the salons and public spaces of the capital. La Tour frequented the salon of Marie Thérèse Geoffrin and painted Alexandre Le Riche de La Popelinière (c. 1755), both of whom undoubtedly introduced him to sitters. In these circles, geniality and sociability were prized: as the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote, in 1709 (in a lapidary metaphor with fortuitous echoes of the pastel painting process), ‘[w]e polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision’. Artistically, many were also drawn to the recent artistic theories of Roger de Piles, for whom the most important feature of any painting was its ability to create a pleasurable illusion. ‘If [pictures] instruct us,’ he wrote, ‘so much the better; if they don’t, we still have the pleasure of viewing a kind of creation that both amuses and moves us.’ Part of this pleasure is the ultimate reveal: having been initially drawn in, the viewer is agreeably surprised to discover they have been tricked.
Harnessing the sensuality of the new age, La Tour gleefully represents the crunch of velvet, the delicacy of lace and the reflection on a celadon vase. His powers in this regard are encapsulated in his portrait of Madame de Pompadour. Strategically selected to be his sole submission to the Salon of 1755, and standing at nearly two metres high, it shows the king’s erstwhile mistress at gilded leisure, wearing a fabulous silk dress and resting her elegant heeled shoes on a Turkish carpet. Not everyone was impressed: Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, sniffed that the paper was ‘so overloaded with ornaments, pompoms and frills that it must injure the eyes of all persons of taste’. However, like La Tour’s earlier, similarly full-size, portrait of Gabriel Bernard, comte de Rieux, of 1739–41, the picture is a result of La Tour pushing the technical possibilities of pastel to their limits. Until the introduction (in 1799) of the Fourdrinier machine, which produces paper in one continuous roll, the largest readily available piece of paper was approximately 70 x 50cm; to paint Pompadour, La Tour therefore glued seven irregularly shaped sheets together, concealing the joins along natural lines in the composition. Once completed, the portrait’s technical ambition was sealed with a glass sheet of almost unprecedented size.
The Marquise de Pompadour (1752–55), Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. Musée du Louvre, Paris
Though the skill evident throughout La Tour’s portraits helped contribute to their illusionism, many of the qualities prized by de Piles were, in fact, inherent to all pastels. Light bounces off the powdered pigment in many directions at once, giving these paintings a special luminosity, coupled with an apparently velvety-soft texture, which cannot fully be conveyed in reproduction. At the same time, in a piquant twist, the frank appeal of pastel to the touch is inevitably succeeded by the discovery of its material fragility. Indeed, this tension between sumptuousness and delicacy may be part of La Tour’s enduring success. Devoid of the ponderous wigs and formal poses favoured by the portraitists at the court of Versailles, his subjects have an undeniable humanity. Many of them smile. Voltaire, whose portrait was exhibited alongside the artist’s smiling self-portrait in 1737, positively beams, perhaps in the consciousness of his conviction that (as he wrote) ‘after the mournful final years of Louis XIV […] everything [had] changed to gaiety and fun’.
Smiling itself was something of an innovation in protocol, at least in portraiture. ‘Laughter’ had been included in the famous Conférence on facial expressions delivered to art students by the Academy’s then-rector, Charles Le Brun, in 1668, but Le Brun had spent remarkably little time on it. The illustration to the 1727 Paris edition (by Jean Audran) is one of the book’s least successful, and most laborious. A smile’s transience makes it arguably the most difficult expression to capture; doubly so when working in a heavy medium such as oil. By contrast, La Tour’s smiles contribute to the liveliness and spontaneity of his work; to their quality of directness, and the suggestion of having captured something fleeting. To achieve this effect, La Tour tended to work rapidly in front of the sitter – often, as a result of his significant short- sightedness, no more than two feet away – and, rather than requiring them to sit still, he engaged them in conversation. (Opinions seem to have differed on whether he could live up to the sparkle of Democritus. The writer Jean-François Marmontel wrote to his children that ‘you have a study of my portrait by La Tour, and this is the reward for the complaisance with which I listened to him tediously arranging the future of Europe’.) Only after the sitter had gone home did the artist add the clothes and accessories, and the contrast in approach to their faces and their bodies is evident, in that his poses, unlike his physiognomies, often work more or less to a formula. Élisabeth Ferrand ‘meditating on Newton’ (c. 1752), is arranged in much the same way as the musician Madame Anne-Jeanne Cassanéa de Mondonville (c. 1752) leaning against a harpsichord. Both pictures closely resemble the composition La Tour used for his portrait of his lover, the sparkling-eyed actress Marie Fel (c. 1757).
Portrait of Louis de Silvestre (c. 1753), Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Indeed, for many modern viewers, the immediate results of La Tour’s initial sittings – sketches known as préparations – are his most evocative. Heads emerge, ghostlike, from buff coloured paper, often devoid of any features to root them definitively in the 18th (or indeed any) century. With his head wrapped in a turban, the disembodied Louis de Silvestre looks frankly at the viewer, every mole and vein faithfully recorded in high contrast black and white. The surviving préparations for a lost portrait of the actress Marie-Anne Botot suggest that La Tour often produced these small works in series, moving from black charcoal to colour and turning the head right, left and to the front, the final grouping creating a sense of movement and animation. Though their appeal seems obvious today, there is no evidence that these studies were particularly prized by their creator. They have survived primarily because the contents of La Tour’s studio remained in Saint-Quentin, the town where he was born and died, and formed the nucleus of what is now the Musée des Beaux-Arts Antoine-Lécuyer. In the same year, 11 préparations were offered to the Louvre, but the painter Alexis-Nicolas Perignon demurred that they could only have been of use to the artist himself. For much of the artistic establishment, even finished pastels were increasingly regarded as figuratively, as well as literally, lightweight. The consensus began to shift only later in the century. In the 1860s, the Goncourt brothers returned from Saint-Quentin in raptures and reserved particular praise for La Tour’s preparatory studies. ‘The head comes towards you,’ they wrote, with characteristic theatrics. ‘It comes out of its frame, it emerges from the paper, and it seems to you that you have never seen […] a pastel so much like a living person’. A new generation of French artists and collectors, including Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt, soon came to share their enthusiasm, recognising that, at least in the hands of La Tour, pastel painting could be as brilliantly effervescent as the particles from which it was formed.
From the February 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.