A seated abbé, an early work recorded through the Munich Central Collecting Point — the post-war clearing-house of displaced art: the young La Tour's hard, searching first manner, and a provenance that documents the twentieth century's traffic in the eighteenth's faces.

Voltaire (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm): a version of the founding image — the philosophe at forty, the smile at its most dangerous. Stockholm's sheet belongs to the constellation of autograph repetitions through which the 1735 portrait became the Enlightenment's trademark face; Sweden's francophile court collected the movement's icons at source.

Voltaire (Musée Antoine-Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin): the home fonds' Voltaire — kept in the studio stock, the face the engravers multiplied across Europe. Seen at Saint-Quentin among the préparations, it shows the machine's founding product in the workshop that built it.

Self-portrait 'à l'œil-de-bœuf' (Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva): the young painter laughing under the round window that names the sheet — the Salon-debut self-image: informal, delighted, the address announced as a career. Geneva's ownership sets it fittingly beside its Liotards: the medium's two poles, self-portrayed, one museum.

Self-portrait 'à l'index' (Louvre): the painter pointing at the viewer — the cockiest gesture in eighteenth-century self-portraiture: you're next. The index-finger address made the young La Tour's manifesto: the portraitist as the one who chooses; the Louvre keeps the challenge on permanent notice.

Portrait of Philibert Orry (Louvre): Louis XV's finance minister and director of the Bâtiments — the state's purse and the arts' administrator — pastelled at the moment La Tour was conquering the Salon Orry superintended: the artist portraying, with due address, the man who ran the system he was about to dominate.

Portrait of Mme Rouillé de l'Estang (Frick Collection, New York): a financier's wife in the late-1730s manner — the early clientele of the robe and the till, now in the Frick's cabinet: with the Getty's Rieux, the American East's window on La Tour's first grand decade.

Claude Dupouch (National Gallery of Art, Washington; pastel): the painter's old friend — by tradition his first drawing-master at Saint-Quentin's fringes — portrayed with the warmth reserved for the pre-fame world: plain coat, direct eyes, no apparatus. Washington's sheet is the early manner's human best.

Claude Dupouch (Musée Antoine-Lécuyer): the Saint-Quentin version of the friend's portrait — kept, tellingly, in the studio fonds to the end: the face of the man who first put a crayon in his hand, retained through fifty years of kings and philosophes.

Marie-Josèphe de Saxe, dauphine of France (Musée Antoine-Lécuyer): the Saxon princess who married the dauphin in 1747 — mother of three kings of France — in one of La Tour's several portrayals across her court life; the Saint-Quentin sheet keeps the dauphine in the workshop's own archive.

Marie-Sophie de Courcillon, duchesse de Pecquigny, princesse de Rohan (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm): one of the great beauties of the court in the 1740 manner — silks and address at full charm; Stockholm's second La Tour, the Swedish court's francophilia again collecting at source.

The picture

Pastel and gouache on paper mounted on canvas, roughly two metres by one and a half with its frame — J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: the largest and most ambitious pastel of La Tour's early maturity, and the work with which the medium announced that it acknowledged no ceiling. Gabriel Bernard de Rieux, président of the second Chambre des enquêtes of the Parlement de Paris — son of the colossally rich financier Samuel Bernard, a new fortune robed in old office — sits life-size in his study in magistrate's black and crimson, at a table with globe, books and papers, a folding screen and rich furnishings about him; he looks up from his documents as if the viewer had just been announced. Exhibited at the Salon of 1741 to public astonishment, it made La Tour's grand manner overnight.

Pastel at the scale of state

Everything about the work is a demonstration. The sheer size required a mosaic of blue-paper sheets, joined and mounted with a precision that still holds after nearly three centuries — the joins run through the composition, managed under drapery-folds and shadow; the sustained finish across square metres of surface (the lace at the cuffs; the globe's varnished gleam; the screen's oriental figures; the black robe modelled black-on-black, dead colour made breathing) matched and outbid the grand oil portraiture of Rigaud's school on its own terms; and the lighting — a study's daylight, cool and complete — organises the apparatus around the one thing La Tour cared for: the face, mid-address, intelligent, faintly amused, the magistrate as a man one is about to talk to. Contemporaries understood the manifesto: pastel — the boudoir's medium, women's medium, the sketch's medium — had produced a state portrait, and the hierarchy of media, like every hierarchy this artist met, had been told to wait.

The sitter and the commission

The choice of client was itself strategic on both sides. The Bernard fortune was the age's byword for new money (Samuel Bernard had financed Louis XIV's wars); the son's parliamentary robe was the fortune's laundering into honour; and a portrait of maximum magnificence in the newest fashionable medium served the family's project precisely — while the fee, suitably enormous and suitably publicised, served La Tour's. The pendant logic completed the family theatre: La Tour also portrayed the président's young second wife, Suzanne, in ball dress with her mask (the Cognacq-Jay's picture, next in this catalogue) — office and pleasure, robe and domino, the parliamentary couple in the age's two costumes.

History

The pastel stayed with the family and its descendants into the twentieth century, passing through the Rothschild collections — its size and fragility making every move an event — and was acquired by the Getty in 1994: the most important pastel to cross the Atlantic, and the anchor of the museum's eighteenth-century rooms. Its survival in brilliant condition (the sheltered life of great houses; the medium's immortality when still) makes it the best place in America to learn what the Salon public saw in 1741: colour without varnish, presence without age — the eighteenth century not preserved but, disconcertingly, present.

What to look at

The face above all — the upward glance's calibrated welcome, the first great statement of the La Tour address; the black robe's modelling (count the blacks: warm, cool, dead, lit — a lesson every painter takes); the lace, drawn with the point at stroke-scale and fused at viewing distance; the globe and papers — the magistrate's world rendered with a still-life painter's patience; the sheet-joins, findable in raking light and invisible at reading range — the machine's engineering showing its mastery precisely by not showing; and the scale itself, best measured by standing at conversational distance and realising the sitter meets you there, life-size, three centuries on — the medium's fragility and the image's authority in one uncanny equilibrium.

The picture

Pastel on blue paper mounted on canvas, Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris. Suzanne-Marie-Henriette de Boulainvilliers, the young second wife of the président de Rieux, in masquerade dress — silks, flowers, powder — holding the black domino mask she has just removed (or not yet put on), the ball's candle-light warmth on her face and the address at its most charming: the pendant, in pleasure's register, to the Getty's monument of office.

The mask, held

The accessory makes the picture's meaning and its modern fame. Masquerade was the century's institution of licensed anonymity — the opera ball where ranks mixed and identities suspended — and its portrait-iconography usually plays coy: the mask worn, the identity teased. La Tour's sitter holds the mask away: the face is given, candid and lit, and the little black vizard in her hand becomes the emblem of everything the portrait declines to do — conceal, perform, defend. Critics have read the conceit as the artist's signature statement doubled: the pastellist of the unmasked address portraying the very instrument of masking, disarmed; the social self shown choosing, for the portrait's duration, to be seen. That the sitter was young, rich, and recently married into one of France's most conspicuous fortunes gives the choice its poignancy — the picture is presence offered from inside a life of performance — and the Cognacq-Jay's public, meeting her between the museum's Bouchers and its bonbonnières, regularly singles her out for the effect this catalogue's essay names: she looks back, and seems about to speak.

Pendants and the pair's fortunes

Painted in the same campaign as the président's machine and shown at the Salon beside it, the two Rieux portraits stated the pair-logic the age loved — his black and her silk, office and festivity, the robe's gravity and the ball's licence — and their later separation (his to California, hers to Paris's museum of eighteenth-century intimacy) has divided the argument between continents: the Getty holds the demonstration of power, the Cognacq-Jay the demonstration of charm, and students of La Tour must cross an ocean to reunite the marriage. Ernest Cognacq's collection — the Samaritaine fortune spent on the dix-huitième at its most seductive — received her in the taste-revival the essay chronicles: the Belle Époque buying back the ancien régime's pleasures; the picture has been one of the museum's signatures since.

What to look at

The mask itself — black, boneless, dangling: the portrait's whole theory in a prop; the flowers at the bodice, pastel's powder rendering petal-powder (medium and subject briefly identical); the candle-warmth of the flesh against the blue paper's cool (the ball's lighting reconstructed in temperature alone); the smile's exact stage — earlier than the Voltaire irony, later than mere politeness: pleasure's opening move; and the pairing, held in the mind's eye with the Getty's président: the parliamentary couple, forty years before the Revolution that abolished their world, keeping — in dust, behind glass, on two continents — the ancien régime's two best faces: the one that governed, and the one that danced. Condition is fine, the fragile carmines of cheek and flower unusually well preserved — the sheltered Parisian life of a picture that never had to travel.

The Abbé Jean-Jacques Huber Reading (Musée Antoine-Lécuyer): the jovial abbé absorbed in his book by candle-glow — La Tour's most Rembrandtesque picture and the fonds' great exception: no address at all, attention turned wholly inward; the pastellist of conversation painting, once, the pleasure of reading alone — and proving he could have owned that register too.

Portrait of Louis, dauphin of France (Louvre): the king's serious son — bookish, devout, dead at thirty-six before reigning — in the state pastel manner: the Louvre's dauphin heads the royal file this catalogue meets repeatedly; his three sons would reign as Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X — the faces of the century's end, all descended from this sitter.

Louis Duval de l'Épinoy (Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon): the financier seated with his books and papers, life-size, silk coat gleaming — the machine manner at the Rieux level, and by many judgments La Tour's masterpiece of male portraiture: presence, intelligence and fabric in perfect concert. Gulbenkian bought it in the Soviet sales era; Lisbon's pastel is the Iberian peninsula's other La Tour summit, and the one his connoisseurs cross borders for.

Portrait of the duc de Villars, governor of Provence (Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence): the marshal's son in the governor's dignity — the provincial grandee pastelled for his province, where the Granet keeps him still: ancien-régime administration's face, at home in Aix.

Préparation for a portrait of Louis XV (Metropolitan Museum of Art): the king's face alone, seized at sitting speed — the wig a ghost, the address royal by habit rather than apparatus. The Met's sheet is the préparation aesthetic at the highest social altitude: the most public face in France, caught in private, before the machine was built around it.

Prince Henry Benedict Stuart, Cardinal York (National Galleries of Scotland): the last Stuart — the Young Pretender's brother, made cardinal in 1747 — pastelled during the family's French hopes after the '45: Jacobite portraiture at its most poignant, the dynasty's final face, by the Hanoverians' enemy's favourite medium; Edinburgh's ownership completes the irony gently.

Portrait of Marie Leszczyńska, queen of France (Louvre): the patient Polish queen — kind, pious, serially betrayed — given La Tour's plain truth: no goddess apparatus, a good face under the lace, the address gentle. The queen reportedly preferred his likenesses for exactly the quality the court found deficient: resemblance; the Louvre's sheet is the monarchy's most human document.

Maurice de Saxe, marshal of France (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden): Fontenoy's victor at the peak of glory, in armour's shine rendered in powder — the Salon of 1748's sensation, and pastel's proof it could do steel. Dresden's ownership repatriates the Saxon: Augustus's natural son, France's marshal, home in his father's gallery.

Charles-Louis-Auguste Fouquet, duc de Belle-Isle (Musée Carnavalet, Paris): Fouquet's grandson risen to marshal and war minister — the ancien régime's great rehabilitation story — in the 1748 manner; Carnavalet, Paris's own museum, keeps the city's soldier-administrator among its portraits of the capital's men.

Portrait of the maréchal de Saxe (Musée de la Vie romantique, Paris): a version of the victor's head from the 1748 campaign — the marshal's face multiplied for admirers as victories were; its home in the Romantics' museum is an accident of collecting with its own charm: Fontenoy's hero among George Sand's relics.

Portrait of Louis XV (Louvre; drawing): the royal face in the working state — the Louvre's sheet documents the sittings the anecdotes made famous: the king, doors locked at the artist's insistence, holding still on the artist's terms.

Marie-Josèphe de Saxe, dauphine (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden): the Saxon dauphine for the Saxon court — the portrait sent home to Dresden, where it hangs by her father Augustus III's collections: dynastic portraiture doing its postal duty, in the fragile medium that hated travel and made the journey anyway.

Jean-Charles Garnier d'Isle (Metropolitan Museum of Art): the king's garden-designer — Pompadour's landscape architect at Crécy and Bellevue — pastelled with collegial warmth: the artist of made views portraying the artist of made grounds; the Met's second La Tour.

Madame Du Châtelet at her desk: Voltaire's Émilie — mathematician, translator of Newton, the century's most formidable female mind — shown at work, papers and instruments about her. The attribution and dating carry scholarly reserve, but the image belongs to La Tour's world completely: the philosophes' company included one woman of science, and the portrait tradition kept her at her desk, where she belonged and chose to be.

Madame de Pompadour in her Study (Louvre): the medium's Everest — the marquise full-length among Encyclopédie, Montesquieu, Voltaire's epic and her music, five years in the making, shown at the Salon of 1755: pastel's grandest machine and the Enlightenment's most complete portrait of intelligent power. The essay's case-study chapter gives it full measure; before the original, note the detachable truth the reproduction hides — the head worked on its own sheet, the person distinct from the program — and the tired, mortal, superbly intelligent face inside the manifesto: she died at forty-two; the portrait is patronage's monument and its elegy in one.

Portrait of Nicole Ricard (Louvre): a child of his intimate circle — Marie Fel's niece by the standard account — pastelled with the tenderness the great machines never needed: childhood's unarmoured address; the Louvre's small sheet is the œuvre's gentlest corner.

The picture

Pastel on blue paper, Musée de Picardie, Amiens. The painter at mid-career and mid-laugh: turned three-quarters, plainly dressed with the white frill at the throat, wig informal, the face lit full and the smile complete — not beginning, for once, but arrived: teeth almost showing, eyes bright with the joke. Of the many self-portraits (the catalogue meets the cocky 'à l'index' of 1737, the Genevan 'œil-de-bœuf', the late Saint-Quentin sheets), the Amiens pastel is the canonical one — the image reproduced wherever La Tour is named, the artist's own definitive statement of the address he sold.

The laughing self-portrait

Its art-historical position is a hinge. The laughing self-portrait had disreputable ancestors (Rembrandt's tavern turns, the low-life tradition) and one great predecessor cult in France — none: dignity forbade it. La Tour's smile, worn by the artist himself at the height of official success, changed the genre's terms: this is not carnival laughter but society's — the wit at his own table, delight professionally understood — and its self-application completed the argument his sitters' smiles had been making for a decade: if the king may smile, and the philosophe, then the maker of smiles may too; the portraitist joins his century's conversation as an equal. Every account of eighteenth-century self-portraiture pivots on this sheet; its descendants run from Vigée Le Brun's smiling self-portraits (a direct, acknowledged lineage — her open-mouthed Salon self-portrait scandal of 1787 fought on ground he had cleared) to the whole modern informality of the artist's self-image.

The face as advertisement

Contemporaries also read the sheet at trade level, and rightly: the self-portrait was La Tour's shop-sign — proof, hung at the Salon, that the sorcery worked on the sorcerer; multiplied in versions (Saint-Quentin and other collections hold variants and préparations) and spread by engraving, it fixed his public identity as securely as the Voltaire fixed the philosophe's. The confidence borders on challenge: the eyes assess the viewer with the professional's rapid read — the look, one imagines, that his sitters met first across the easel — and the smile has the seller's edge his contemporaries described: brilliance offering itself, on its own terms, at its own price. That the same face would end in the broken late self-portraits of Saint-Quentin gives the Amiens sheet its retrospective gravity: this is the machine at perfect pitch, portrait of the faculty itself — attention, delighted — before the long wearing-out.

Amiens and the Picard triangle

The Musée de Picardie's ownership keeps the image in the artist's home province, an hour from Saint-Quentin: with the Lécuyer fonds and the birthplace registers, the Amiens self-portrait completes what the essay calls the Picard triangle — the region holding its great son's beginning, his workshop's residue, and his definitive face. The museum hangs it as a treasure and lends it almost never (pastel's physics again); its reproductions, though, have made it among the most familiar artists' faces of any century — the eighteenth century's laughter, issued at last in its owner's name.

What to look at

The smile's completeness — compare the sitters' calibrated beginnings: only on himself did he let the expression land; the frill's whites, a bravura scale of warm and cool against the coat; the blue paper working openly at the edges — the informality material as well as social; the eyes' assessing light (the second catch-light on the lower lid, the technical signature, plainly visible); and the general likeness to us — the effect every visitor reports: of all the age's faces this one has weathered least; the man who caught the century's present tense caught his own, and it is still, disarmingly, present.

Self-portrait with lace jabot (Musée Cognacq-Jay; drawing): the Amiens smile's Parisian cousin at drawing-state — the self-image in working form, kept now in the museum of dix-huitième intimacy: the shop-sign, sketched.

Antoine-Gaspard Grimod de La Reynière, fermier-général (Musée Antoine-Lécuyer): the tax-farm's magnate — the gastronome dynasty's founder generation — in the 1751 manner: the financier clientele at its most polished; Saint-Quentin keeps the moneyed Paris that paid for the philosophes' faces.

Marguerite Le Comte (Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe): the engraver-amateur and salonnière of the Watelet circle — art's own company — pastelled with collegial sparkle; Karlsruhe's La Tour represents the artist among the artists, his easiest society.

Marquise de Pompadour (Musée Antoine-Lécuyer): the marquise's face in the workshop's own version — the head, without the Louvre machine's apparatus: Saint-Quentin's Pompadour shows what the essay's case-study argues, the person detachable from the program, kept by the maker.