Maurice-Quentin De La Tour
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Neil Jeffares, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour Saint-Quentin 5.IX.1704–16/17.II.1788 This Essay is central to the La Tour fascicles in the online Dictionary which IV. CRITICAL FORTUNE 38 are indexed and introduced here. The work catalogue is divided into the IV.1 The vogue for pastel 38 following sections: IV.2 Responses to La Tour at the salons 38 • Part I: Autoportraits IV.3 Contemporary reputation 39 • Part II: Named sitters A–D IV.4 Posthumous reputation 39 • Part III: Named sitters E–L IV.5 Prices since 1800 42 • General references etc. 43 Part IV: Named sitters M–Q • Part V: Named sitters R–Z AURICE-QUENTIN DE LA TOUR was the most • Part VI: Unidentified sitters important pastellist of the eighteenth century. Follow the hyperlinks for other parts of this work available online: M Matisse bracketed him with Rembrandt among • Chronological table of documents relating to La Tour portraitists.1 “Célèbre par son talent & par son esprit”2 – • Contemporary biographies of La Tour known as an eccentric and wit as well as a genius, La Tour • Tropes in La Tour biographies had a keen sense of the importance of the great artist in • Besnard & Wildenstein concordance society which would shock no one today. But in terms of • Genealogy sheer technical bravura, it is difficult to envisage anything to match the enormous pastels of the président de Rieux J.46.2722 Contents of this essay or of Mme de Pompadour J.46.2541.3 The former, exhibited in the Salon of 1741, stunned the critics with its achievement: 3 I. BIOGRAPHICAL THEMES this was, after all, “just” a pastel, but the miracle planted La I.1 The name 3 I.2 Early biographies and sources 4 Tour firmly centre stage, where he was to remain for thirty I.3 Family background 5 years, with a stream of commissions from the royal family, I.4 Early years 7 the old nobility, the noblesse de robe and the nouveaux riches I.5 Early works 9 financiers – the most powerful, the wealthiest, the most I.6 La Tour at the Académie royale 10 famous and the best informed sitters of ancien régime I.7 The galeries du Louvre 10 France – not to mention the artists and intellectuals he I.8 La Tour’s other residences 11 counted as his friends, and among whom he was perhaps at I.9 Royal portraits 13 his best as a portraitist. I.10 Stuart commissions 13 This virtuosity was not achieved without struggle: La Tour I.11 The self-portraits 13 was a precursor of the tortured artist of the nineteenth I.12 La Tour’s clientèle 14 4 I.13 Later years – health etc. 15 century, agonising over so-called préparations in which he I.14 Marie Fel 16 attempted to capture the soul of his sitter, and continuing to I.15 Fees 16 work for decades on portraits that did not satisfy him, often I.16 Finances 16 to their detriment. Unsurprisingly a good number of his I.17 La Tour’s friends: artists, legacies 18 works are self-portraits where the sitter’s patience was not I.18 Pupils 19 an issue. That quest for perfection may have developed into I.19 Science and literature 20 the madness which took over the last years of his life. I.20 Philanthropy and freemasonry 21 His œuvre consists almost entirely of pastel portraits, both II. THE WORK 23 II.1 From préparation to portrait 23 final works and associated préparations in chalk, II.2 Resemblance 24 occasionally with some pastel; he did not work in oil or II.3 Compositions 25 miniature, draw other than in chalk, nor make prints. He II.4 Larger compositions 25 exhibited more pastels (and more portraits) at the official II.5 Accessories 27 Paris salons than any other artist during the eighteenth II.6 Faces and intelligence 28 century – although, even allowing for losses, he was far less II.7 Finish 29 productive than some other pastellists. He spent virtually his III. TECHNICAL ASPECTS 30 entire career in Paris, unlike rivals such as Perronneau and III.1 Scientific investigations 30 Liotard who travelled widely to secure business and establish III.2 Materials 30 III.4 Engravings 34 their reputation. III.5 Copies; pupils 34 La Tour’s fame throughout Europe in his lifetime was III.6 Frames 35 enormous. His importance has since inevitably made him III.7 Early methods of transport and conservation 36 the subject of much scholarly attention. This has yielded III.8 Questions 37 limited information about some of the most interesting 1 Marie-Alain Couturier, Se garder libre: journal, 1947–1954, 1962, p. 119; v. 3 J numbers refer to the catalogue or Dictionary: those commencing J.46. to infra for critical fortune and FLORILEGEUM for full text. the La Tour catalogue, J.I.46., J.IF.46., and J.M.46. to the ICONOGRAPHY and 2 The phrase is Charles Palissot de Montenoy’s, in a gloss on a letter of other J numbers to the online Dictionary of pastellists. Voltaire of 11.XII.1765 in his 1792 edition. 4 Hoisington 2016, p. 60, points out that La Tour called these works études, and suggests the word préparation was first used in this sense by the Goncourts: in fact Champfleury anticipated them in 1855. www.pastellists.com – all rights reserved 1 Updated 7 October 2021 Dictionary of pastellists before 1800 questions. The apparent wealth of salon criticism turns out to be largely repetitive, although this has not prevented it (and some of the better known portraits) being overanalysed from fashionable academic slants. The biographical details of a handful of more or less contemporary sources have been endlessly repeated and embellished, and inferences from casual observations developed beyond sense. The basic biographical facts – mostly gathered in the late nineteenth century by art historians and archivists such as Charles Desmaze, Champfleury, Georges Lecocq, Maurice Tourneux, Élie Fleury and Gaston Brière – were largely consolidated in Georges Wildenstein’s 1928 monograph (“B&W”5), together with a body of work which, through the range of its subjects and the skill of its execution, dominates the field. By no means all of the 990 entries in Wildenstein’s catalogue are by La Tour – but there are a great many omissions and confusions about the status of repetitions. The extent of the book’s errors and omissions may be gleaned from our B&W Concordance, which include numerous pastels reattributed here to artists from Vivien to Vigée Le Brun.6 B&W has not hitherto been superseded in scope, despite the more accurate and far better illustrated works by Christine Debrie and Xavier Salmon and the discoveries presented in the 2004 exhibition at Versailles.7 The challenge of securely establishing the full œuvre has nevertheless largely been ignored, with scholars, daunted by the virtual impossibility of establishing a reliable chronology,8 showing little interest in this task, concentrating instead on analysing a small number of well- known works or focused on embedding La Tour into academic theses about the Enlightenment, the role of artists and the social structure implied by portraiture. While scientific investigations offer some promise of deeper insight into La Tour’s technique, the main tool for establishing authenticity remains connoisseurship, and the primary resource the body of information we gather in the catalogue and in our expanded and updated version of B&W’s chronological table of DOCUMENTS (documents that can be found there are referenced below by date alone to avoid a plethora of footnotes). They constitute the only accurate biography of the sitter. Here is a link to the index page for the various files comprising this online La Tour monograph and catalogue raisonné. Much of the most important information is contained in the essays on specific works, summaries of which are embedded in the work catalogue (divided into six fascicles), and is not duplicated in this essay (nor is duplicated information that belongs in other parts of the online Dictionary, whether pastels by other artists, general information on the medium, or indexes of sitters etc.). In this work the emphasis is on facts, works and documents, not on theories or anecdotes. 5 Essentially written by Georges Wildenstein with a short introduction by J.46. numbers in this work. Fewer than 300 of these are universally accepted Albert Besnard, whose name nevertheless appears on the title page as co- as fully autograph, and even this number includes numerous préparations. author. 7 The only book published in English, by Adrian Bury, is of very limited 6 The B&W catalogue includes a great many works in upper and lower case value (it even reproduces a work by a different artist on the cover). type, indicating that no opinion on attribution is expressed (shown below 8 As Debrie 1991, p. 20, rightly observed, “il est hasardeux, voire as “?attr.” after the B&W number, equivalent to an absent ϕ in our impossible, de déceler dans la production de La Tour une œuvre de ses classification); unsurprisingly they include a number of works by different débuts d’une œuvre plus tardive.” Tourneux 1904 was similarly candid: “La artists. These misattributions, copies and undecidable “œuvres Tour n’a pas … pris le soin de dresser la liste des portraits qu’il exécutait mentionnées” (including repeated records of the same work) make up the sans les dater ni les signer; aussi leur nombre total et leur chronologie bulk of the 990 numbers in B&W, as they do within the 1900 works with rigoureuse nous échapperont-ils toujours.” www.pastellists.com – all rights reserved 2 Updated 7 October 2021 Dictionary of pastellists before 1800 I.