Maurice Quentin de La Tour (5 September 1704 – 17 February 1788) was a French

Rococo Rococo (, also ), less commonly Roccoco or Late Baroque, is an exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style of architecture, art and decoration which combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, white and pastel colours, sculpted moulding, ...

portrait A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expressions are predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this ...

ist who worked primarily with

pastel A pastel () is an art medium in a variety of forms including a stick, a square a pebble or a pan of color; though other forms are possible; they consist of powdered pigment and a binder. The pigments used in pastels are similar to those use ...

s. Among his most famous subjects were

Voltaire François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his '' nom de plume'' M. de Voltaire (; also ; ), he was famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianity—e ...

, Rousseau,

Louis XV Louis XV (15 February 1710 – 10 May 1774), known as Louis the Beloved (french: le Bien-Aimé), was King of France from 1 September 1715 until his death in 1774. He succeeded his great-grandfather Louis XIV at the age of five. Until he reache ...

and

Madame de Pompadour Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (, ; 29 December 1721 – 15 April 1764), commonly known as Madame de Pompadour, was a member of the French court. She was the official chief mistress of King Louis XV from 1745 to 1751, and rem ...

Biography

Maurice Quentin de La Tour was born in Saint-Quentin, the third son of a musician, François de La Tour. François was from

Laon Laon () is a city in the Aisne department in Hauts-de-France in northern France. History Early history The holy district of Laon, which rises a hundred metres above the otherwise flat Picardy plain, has always held strategic importance. ...

and he was the son of a master mason, Jean de La Tour, of

and Saint-Quentin, who died in 1674. François de La Tour apparently was successively a trumpet-player for the rifle regiment of the Duc du Maine, and musician to the master of the

collegiate church of Saint-Quentin The Basilica of Saint-Quentin (french: Basilique Saint-Quentin), formerly the Collegiate Church of Saint-Quentin (french: Collégiale Saint-Quentin) is a Catholic church in the town of Saint-Quentin, Aisne, France. There have been religious bui ...

. He is popularly said to have disapproved of his son taking up the arts, but there is nothing to support this. According to François Marandet in 2002, an apprenticeship was arranged for the young Maurice, with a painter named Dupouch, from 12 October 1719, but it is not known when this contract was terminated. Little is known of de La Tour's background until, when barely nineteen, he went to Paris indefinitely, fleeing an indiscretion concerning his cousin, Anne Bougier; by this age he was claiming painting as his profession. After travelling briefly to England in 1725, he returned to Paris in 1727, where he was encouraged to begin working as a portraitist in pastels. His earliest known portrait, which is attested only by an engraving made in 1731 by Langlois, was a portrait of

. In 1737, at the Paris Salon, de La Tour exhibited the portraits of ''Madame Boucher'', the wife of the painter

François Boucher François Boucher ( , ; ; 29 September 1703 – 30 May 1770) was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher, who worked in the Rococo style. Boucher is known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories ...

, and ''l'Auteur qui rit'' or ''Self-Portrait, Laughing'' (musée du Louvre), the first of a series of 150 portraits that served as one of the glories of the

Paris Salon The Salon (french: Salon), or rarely Paris Salon (French: ''Salon de Paris'' ), beginning in 1667 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial ar ...

for the next 36 years. Nevertheless, the painter Joseph Ducreux claimed to be his only student (although this is unlikely). On 25 May 1737, de La Tour was officially recognised (''agréé'') by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and soon attracted the attention of the

French court A royal court, often called simply a court when the royal context is clear, is an extended royal household in a monarchy, including all those who regularly attend on a monarch, or another central figure. Hence, the word "court" may also be appl ...

. According to Jeffares, he had an apartment in the Palais du Louvre in 1745. By the late 1760s, his portraiture of the royal family had ceased. De La Tour was popularly perceived as endowing his portrait subjects with a distinctive charm and intelligence, while his delicate but sure touch with the pastel medium rendered a pleasing softness to their features. Contemporary accounts describe de La Tour's nature as lively, good-humoured, but eccentric. In many of his self-portraits he depicts himself smiling out from the frame towards the viewer; Laura Cumming states of de La Tour that "where other artists make heavy weather of portraying themselves, he takes the task lightly and seems to have produced more glad-faced self-portraits than any other artist". However, being of an excessively nervous disposition (which eventually descended into dementia), and an exacting practitioner, he has also been described as over-engineering his work, to the point of spoiling it.Emilia, Lady Dilke, ''French Painters of the XVIIIth Century'' (London: George Bell and Sons, 1899), p. 165 As de La Tour's wealth increased from his commissions, so did his philanthropy: he founded a school for drawing in his native Saint-Quentin and donated towards impoverished women in confinement and disabled and ageing artisans and artists. He was also advisor and benefactor to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, and the Academy of Sciences and ''Belles Lettres'' of Amiens. Eventually confined to his home and to the care of his brother, Jean-François, because of encroaching

mental illness A mental disorder, also referred to as a mental illness or psychiatric disorder, is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Such features may be persistent, relapsing and remitt ...

, he retired at the age of 80 to Saint-Quentin, where he died intestate at the age of 83 (he had revoked earlier wills). Jean-François (d. 1807), ''chevalier de l'ordre royal militaire de Saint-Louis'', was the natural heir to his estate.

Gallery

File:D'après Maurice Quentin de La Tour, François-Marie Arouet, dit Voltaire (château de Versailles).jpg, File:Maurice Quentin de La Tour - Marquise de Pompadour - WGA12359.jpg, File:Maurice Quentin de La Tour - Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau - WGA12360.jpg, File:Jean d'Alembert.jpeg, File:Emilie_Chatelet_portrait_by_Latour.jpg, File:Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Portrait de Marie Leczinska, reine de France (1748) - 02.jpg, File:Isabelle Agneta van Tuyll van Serooskerken, by Maurice Quentin de La Tour.jpg, File:Maurice Quentin de La Tour Prince Henry Benedict Clement Stuart.jpg, File:Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet.jpg, File:Louis15-1.jpg, File:Maurice Quentin de La Tour - Mlle Ferrand Meditating on Newton - WGA12355.jpg, Mlle Ferrand Meditating on Newton File:Maurice-Quentin de La Tour - Pierre-Louis Laideguive - Google Art Project.jpg, Pierre-Louis Laideguive File:Jacques DuMont Le Romain by Maurice-Quentin de la Tour.jpg, Jacques du Mont Le Romain File:Maurice de Saxe (1696-1750).PNG, File:Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (French - Portrait of Gabriel Bernard de Rieux - Google Art Project.jpg, Portrait of Gabriel Bernard de Rieux File:Louis de France, dauphin (1745) by Maurice Quentin de La Tour.png, Louis de France, dauphin (1745) File:Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville (original replica) by Maurice Quentin de La Tour.jpg,

Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville Jean-Joseph de Mondonville (, 25 December 1711 (baptised) – 8 October 1772), also known as Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville, was a French violinist and composer. He was a younger contemporary of Jean-Philippe Rameau and enjoyed great succe ...

File:Isabelle de Charrière - Quentin de La Tour.jpg, File:MarieFel.jpg,

Commemoration

French banknotes denominated at 50 francs, issued from 1976 to 1992, featured de La Tour's portrait.

Footnotes

References

* Abécédario de P.-J. Mariette et autres notes inédites de cet amateur sur les arts et les artistes. ''Archives de l'art français''. 1856. t. III, 1854–56, pp. 66–78. * de Goncourt, Edmond and Jules. French XVIII Century Painters. (1867) pp. 165, 171, 176 (first published Paris, 1867, fasc. 4, reprinted New York, 1948; second edition, 1873, pp. 271, 281-282). * Tourneux, Maurice. ''La Tour'', biographie critique. (Paris, 1904) p. 40. * Jeffares, Neil, s.v. 'La Tour, Maurice-Quentin de', In ''Dictionary of Pastellists Before 1800'', http://www.pastellists.com/Articles/LaTour2a.pdf * https://neiljeffares.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/maurice-quentin-de-la-tours-parents/

Attribution

* .

External links

Masters

Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, online editionan interactive multimedia module about the Portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour in the Website of the musée du Louvre
{{DEFAULTSORT:La Tour, Maurice Quentin de 1704 births 1788 deaths 18th-century French painters French male painters French portrait painters Pastel artists People from Saint-Quentin, Aisne 18th-century French male artists