Prolegomena to Pastels & Pastellists
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Prolegomena to Pastels & pastellists NEIL JEFFARES Prolegomena to Pastels & pastellists Published online from 2016 Citation: http://www.pastellists.com/misc/prolegomena.pdf, updated 10 August 2021 www.pastellists.com – © Neil Jeffares – all rights reserved 1 updated 10 August 2021 Prolegomena to Pastels & pastellists www.pastellists.com – © Neil Jeffares – all rights reserved 2 updated 10 August 2021 Prolegomena to Pastels & pastellists CONTENTS I. FOREWORD 5 II. THE WORD 7 III. TREATISES 11 IV. THE OBJECT 14 V. CONSERVATION AND TRANSPORT TODAY 51 VI. PASTELLISTS AT WORK 71 VII. THE INSTITUTIONS 80 VIII. EARLY EXHIBITIONS, PATRONAGE AND COLLECTIONS 94 IX. THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF PASTEL PORTRAITS 101 X. NON-PORTRAIT SUBJECTS 109 XI. PRICES AND PAYMENT 110 XII. COLLECTING AND CRITICAL FORTUNE POST 1800 114 XIII. PRICES POST 1800 125 XIV. HISTORICO-GEOGRAPHICAL SURVEY 128 www.pastellists.com – © Neil Jeffares – all rights reserved 3 updated 10 August 2021 Prolegomena to Pastels & pastellists I. FOREWORD ASTEL IS IN ESSENCE powdered colour rubbed into paper without a liquid vehicle – a process succinctly described in 1760 by the French amateur engraver Claude-Henri Watelet (himself the subject of a portrait by La Tour): P Les crayons mis en poudre imitent les couleurs, Que dans un teint parfait offre l’éclat des fleurs. Sans pinceau le doigt seul place et fond chaque teinte; Le duvet du papier en conserve l’empreinte; Un crystal la défend; ainsi, de la beauté Le Pastel a l’éclat et la fragilité.1 It is at once line and colour – a sort of synthesis of the traditional opposition that had been debated vigorously by theoreticians such as Roger de Piles in the previous century. It is, simultaneously, bright and matt, fragmentary and smooth. It has a unique texture and luminosity – the éclat des fleurs, the dust from butterflies’ wings – derived from the light-reflecting facets of individual particles of pastel pigment, filler and binder. For the English pastellist Francis Cotes, “Crayon pictures, when finely painted, are superlatively beautiful and decorative in a very high degree in apartments that are not too large; for having their surface dry, they partake in appearance of the effect of Fresco and by candle light are luminous and beautiful beyond all other pictures.”2 In a century when the human figure had moved to a central position (although portraitists still occupied a rank below history painters in the hierarchy of the academies), when unparalleled sums were spent on sumptuous clothing, a medium which is capable of creating the illusion of human flesh, powdered wigs, silk dresses and velvet coats was the perfect means to capture the spirit of the age. According to Chaperon, the author of an eighteenth century treatise on pastel, among various types of painting, “aucun autre n’approche autant de la nature. Aucun ne produit des tons si vrais. C’est de la chair, c’est Flore, c’est l’Aurore.”3 Many others have commented on the tactile, or even haptic, attractions of pastel: Mme de Graffigny4 so admired the silk coat in La Tour’s Duval de l’Épinoy at the 1745 salon that she was “prêt à tater l’étoffe, rien n’est si admirable”; while Robert 5 de Montesquiou wanted to kiss Perronneau’s jeune homme aux trois roses J.582.1429. Pastel may be quicker to apply than oil paint, but it is also harder to correct: “Le pastel ne veut pas être tourmenté, trop de travail lui ôte sa fleur.”6 That lends a certain immediacy to its images – a spontaneity which retains the première pensée of an artist’s sketch even when finished, framed and hung: and that merit too was fully prized in the age of Rousseau. Unlike in oil painting, the colours a pastellist works with do not change after drying; and the directness of the medium is even symbolised by the contact of the artist’s flesh with the same substance that forms the image, in contrast to the distance embodied in the handle, ferrule and bristles of a brush. Despite the remarkable achievements of Vivien and La Tour in producing full length pastels on an unprecedented scale, oil painting continued to be preferred for the official portrait en pied – 1 Watelet 1760. Full details of references given in abbreviated form will be found in the BIBLIOGRAPHY of the online site, www.pastellists.com. Hyperlinks shown in SMALL CAPS are references to files listed as tabs on the index page, dispensing with the need to provide the full url in printed copies of this document. Cross-references to the relevant artist article (which may be found on the ARTISTS page) are omitted on each mention of an individual pastellist. Specific pastels are given unique J numbers in the form J.123.456. 2 Cotes 1797. 3 Chaperon 1788, p. 13. 4 Letter of 7.IX.1745 to Devaux. 5 Journu family legend, cited in Jeffares 2013g. 6 Petit de Bachaumont 1750. www.pastellists.com – © Neil Jeffares – all rights reserved 5 updated 10 August 2021 Prolegomena to Pastels & pastellists possibly because the fragility of large, expensive sheets of glass was still a consideration, but with the result that the eighteenth century pastel portrait usually showed the subject, bust length, with few if any accessories, against an indeterminate background, or occasionally in an intimate domestic setting. There are few group portraits, battle scenes are rare – but self-portraits abound. There are numerous pendants of husbands and wives – many no doubt made at the time of their marriage, and myriad portraits of children and unindividuated young women. Pastel never made significant inroads into modes of painting other than the portrait: there are virtually no history pictures, only one major artist (Pillement) systematically made landscapes in pastel, and there are relatively few still lifes or genre pictures in the medium. The reasons for that appear to be largely negative: there was simply no compelling reason to use pastel where there was no impatient sitter, and no obvious textural advantage; the difficulty of obtaining a stable green was another problem. In these prolegomena we aim to summarise the main headings under which pastel may be approached, progressing through materials and methods to an historical survey of the principal artists who used the medium. The chapters are intended as introductory guides to the primary texts, detailed articles and worklists of the Dictionary of pastellists before 1800 (which may be accessed through the index of ARTISTS) and to the supporting reference material also included on the Pastels & pastellists website (these are cited indiscriminately as “the Dictionary” below; references to Chapter, §, supra and infra are restricted to these prolegomena). The thematic approach in this document necessitates some overlap and repetition in the interests of readability. (Reproductions of pastels which may be found in the Dictionary articles are normally omitted here; numbers in the form J.n.m are references to the entries in the Dictionary articles, which may be located with the search facility on the home page, or with Google.) The philosophy of a Dictionary at least in part is a recognition that information is often too broad and too voluminous to be reduced conveniently to a single narrative, and these prolegomena do not set out to contradict that. www.pastellists.com – © Neil Jeffares – all rights reserved 6 updated 10 August 2021 Prolegomena to Pastels & pastellists II. THE WORD ASTEL IS A WORD with a variety of senses; in this chapter we discuss the etymology and uses of the term, its cognates and synonyms. P In the Dictionary it is primarily used to mean ground pigment mixed with fillers and binders, reconstituted into a solid stick and applied to a rough or roughened surface to create pictures. The substance, the medium and the method are all termed “pastel”, while the stick iself, as well as the picture, is “a pastel”.7 Since the point of mixing ground pigment with fillers is to create something soft enough to cover area rather than merely scratch lines, the method should really (and was in the eighteenth century) be termed painting in pastel (for Félibien8 the object was to “faire des portraits ou autres choses qui semblent estre peints”); but because the support is usually paper, some pedants insist on calling it a form of drawing. It follows that the singular is preferable to the plural: “in pastels” suggests discrete crayons, used independently, rather than as a medium which produces a continuous, graded surface. Pastels can of course be used graphically, as they predominantly were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and again in the nineteenth and twentieth; but it is as a form of painting, practised widely across Europe in the eighteenth century, that pastel excites our interest and merit attention sui generis. Usage in eighteenth century France was normally to regard pastel as painting, not drawing.9 Although the drawing/painting debate can be avoided by referring to the pictures with the noun alone,10 the word is seldom used on its own to refer to the activity: “pastel painting” is more frequent than “pastel drawing”. The phrase “Pastel chalks” is to be avoided. In the eighteenth century, pastellists were “peintres en pastel” or “crayon painters”. “Pastelliste” occurs at least as early as 1847 in an article in L’Artiste. Both “pastellist” and “pastelist” are accepted spellings in current British usage. The full Oxford English dictionary (“OED”) lists the first appearance of the word (with two ls) in The Times in 1881 (in relation to Whistler: the article however criticises the artist for referring to his sketches as “pastels” when in fact they were made in black chalk touched with colour in crayons), but among earlier examples is Henry Murray’s The art of painting and drawing in coloured crayons (London, 1856, pp.