Maurice Quentin de La Tour

Rococo portraitist Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788) elevated pastel from a preparatory medium to a respected fine art form. Born in Saint-Quentin, France, to a musician father who disapproved of his artistic ambitions, he went to Paris at fifteen and briefly visited England before establishing himself as a pastel portraitist in 1727. His technical brilliance with the delicate medium was unmatched. Critics feared he would provoke "a distaste for oil paint" with his large-scale, vividly lifelike pastel portraits.

La Tour became portraitist to King Louis XV in 1750 and exhibited at the Paris Salon for 36 years. He captured the inner spirit and intellect of Enlightenment luminaries including Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Madame de Pompadour. His life-size portrait of Pompadour (1756) remains a masterpiece of the medium. Contemporary accounts describe him as lively and good-humored but increasingly eccentric. He generously supported artists and founded a drawing school in his hometown. Mental illness forced his retirement to Saint-Quentin, where his brother cared for him until his death at 83. The Louvre holds major works, while his hometown museum preserves his largest collection.