The Touch of Color PASTELS AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART September 29, 2019 – January 26, 2020 FIRST USED DURING THE RENAISSANCE, pastels are still manufac- tured from a carefully balanced mix of pigment, a filler such as chalk or clay, and a binder, then shaped into sticks and dried. With a single stroke of this stick, the artist applies both color and line. Because of the medi- um’s soft, crumbly texture, the line can be left intact or smudged with a finger or stump (a rolled piece of leather or paper) into a broad area of tone. Pastelists have used this versatile medium in countless different ways over the centuries. Some have covered the surface of the paper or other support with a thick, velvety layer of pastel, while others have taken a more linear approach. Some have even ground the stick to a powder and rubbed it into the support, applied it with a stump, or moist- ened it and painted it on with a brush. Throughout history, the views of artists and their audiences toward the medium have varied as widely as the techniques of those who used it. 2 Fig. 1 Benedetto Luti, Head of a Fig. 2 Rosalba Carriera, Allegory of Bearded Man, 1715, pastel and colored Painting, 1730s, pastel and red chalk chalks on paper, National Gallery of Art, on blue paper, mounted on canvas, Washington, Julius S. Held Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund Samuel H. Kress Collection A few sixteenth-century Italian artists mimicked the lifelike appearance of flaw- used pastel to block out colors in prepara- less skin. Among the most influential tory sketches for paintings. Although pas- of all eighteenth-century pastelists was tel continued to serve this function for Rosalba Carriera (fig. 2). Her fame centuries, it was soon used for other pur- extended well beyond her native Venice poses as well. By the early eighteenth cen- and helped to popularize the pastel por- tury, the medium had become a popular trait throughout Europe. In 1720 she trav- choice for independent works of art: pastel eled to Paris, where her delicately exe- head studies by Benedetto Luti (fig. 1), for cuted portraits and allegorical subjects instance, were so successful that art histo- attracted widespread acclaim. The critic rian Luigi Lanzi complained a century Pierre-Jean Mariette, for instance, praised later that they had “inundated all Europe.” her work, claiming that “this sort of pas- Throughout the eighteenth century, how- tel, with all the strength and truth of col- ever, artists and patrons considered pastel ors, preserves a certain freshness and especially suitable for highly finished lightness of touch . which is superior to portraits: its velvety texture, or “bloom,” that of oil painting.” Carriera’s sitters and 3 4 Fig. 3 Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Fig. 4 Hugh Douglas Hamilton, Frederick Claude Dupouch, c. 1739, pastel on blue North, Later Fifth Earl of Guilford, in paper, mounted on canvas, National Rome, late 1780s, pastel and gouache(?) Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. with touches of graphite on paper, Kress Collection mounted on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the 50th Anniversary Gift Committee patrons included royalty and nobility from tioned as paintings as well. Some artists, throughout Europe. At home in Venice, such as Hugh Douglas Hamilton (fig. 4) her studio became a tourist attraction made elaborate full-length portraits, but as British aristocrats traveling through the majority were half- or bust-length. Italy visited to commission portraits or At a time when opportunities for to admire the examples on view. female artists were exceptionally limited, The taste for pastel portraits was pastel was considered suitable for women especially strong in France and Britain. to use: working with this dry, manufac- By mid-century, French pastelists were tured medium was, as one eighteenth- renowned for their level of technical bril- century writer put it, “far preferable to liance: in their hands, pastel could mimic their soiling their fair hands with paint- the appearance of every texture from the ing in colors in oil.” Practical consider- cold glint of metal to the glow of satin. ations also contributed to this notion. Foremost among the French portraitists A pastel studio devoted primarily to por- was Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. One traits could be run on a smaller scale observer marveled, “We see, we smell, we than the workshop of a painter composing think we can touch everything he paints. large biblical or mythological scenes, It is truly velvet, fur, gauze: it is not possi- which required models and the help of ble that this is merely the deception of assistants — almost always male — who pigments.” La Tour’s contemporaries had to be supervised. admired not only his technical skill but Carriera was far from the only highly also his ability to capture a sitter’s fleeting successful woman pastelist of the century. state of mind — for example, presenting In Paris, for example, pastelist and painter his teacher Claude Dupouch in front of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard was one of just an easel, as though in mid-conversation four women admitted into the Académie in the studio (fig. 3). This momentary Royale (fig. 5). She also taught a number quality was in fact the result of careful of pupils — all of them women — and preparation and multiple preliminary served as official painter to the Mesdames, sketches. Normally executed on paper the daughters of Louis ¥¦. This associa- mounted on canvas, eighteenth-century tion of pastels with the feminine, however, pastel portraits were consistently extended beyond the realm of the artist described as paintings rather than draw- herself, especially as the fashion for pastel ings. In their richly tonal appearance, spread to Britain’s middle class later in with pastel covering the entire surface of the eighteenth century. Intimate, infor- the paper, they certainly resembled paint- mal pastel renditions of family members ings. Framed and covered with glass to were popular decorations for women’s protect their delicate surfaces, they func- spaces, such as dressing rooms. Pastel’s 5 6 Fig. 5 Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Fig. 6 Jean François Millet, Calling A Fashionable Noblewoman Wearing Home the Cows, c. 1866, pastel and a Plumed Hat, c. 1789, pastel on blue conté crayon on tan paper, National paper, mounted on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, New Collection (William A. Clark Collection) Century Fund reputation as simple and easy to master and limited tonal range suited his humble attracted a growing number of amateur subject matter of peasants and shepherds artists, many of them women. An anony- and represented a revolutionary departure mous French treatise of 1788 recom- in the way artists used pastel. mended pastel to female amateurs, noting Millet’s work contributed to an inter- that it could “rescue so many young national revival of the medium, though women from the tedium of solitude,” and the pastels of the late nineteenth century that it was one of the “resources against are so different from their predecessors idleness, the source of so many indiscre- that they represent almost an entirely new tions.” Art supplies were also marketed to art form. In contrast to the intense focus women: one prominent pastel manufac- on portraiture during the eighteenth cen- turer, for instance, offered a selection for tury, no single subject matter dominated ladies containing a range of colors ideal during the revival. The portraits of the for “flowers, figures, and landscapes” — previous century were not forgotten, how- subjects considered suitable for the ever; on the contrary, a new interest in female artist. eighteenth-century art fueled the taste Although the careers of some pastel- for pastel. While the emphasis on lifelike ists in France, including Labille-Guiard’s, appearance in the earlier portraits held survived the French Revolution, the little appeal, artists and critics admired the sumptuous aristocratic portraits of the use of pastel to capture fleeting expres- eighteenth century had fallen out of style sions. In a passage praising La Tour’s by the turn of the century. Pastel sank portraits, the critic Paul Desjardins com- into decades of neglect by most serious mented, “Pastel should be used to convey artists. Its revival in the nineteenth cen- what is most ephemeral in nature — tury represented a significant shift in the the expression passing over the human way both artist and audience regarded the face, the rapid interplay of sunlight and medium. The drawings of Jean-François shadow —nothing more. That’s the tri- Millet, for example, were a revelation umph of this technique. It must capture (fig. 6). Made almost entirely for a single what is most elusive.” This immediacy collector and rarely exhibited during appealed to the growing number of ama- Millet’s lifetime, his pastels had little teur and professional artists who worked influence until they were shown publicly in the open air. It aligned so perfectly after his death in 1875. Millet’s approach with the goals of the impressionists and to pastel could hardly have been more their circle that most of the major artists opposed to the meticulous blending of of the movement worked with pastel at his eighteenth-century predecessors: his one time or another. Beginning in the coarse, energetic hatching, heavy contours, 1860s, Claude Monet turned to it sporadi- 7 Fig. 7 Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, Fig. 8 Édouard Manet, Madame Fig. 9 Edgar Degas, Young Woman 1901, pastel on blue paper, National Michel-Lévy, 1882, pastel on gray Dressing Herself, 1885, pastel over char- Gallery of Art, Washington, Florian primed canvas, National Gallery of Art, coal on tan paper, mounted on board, Carr Fund Washington, Chester Dale Collection National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the W.