Prologue: the age that smiled

Every age chooses a face, and the French eighteenth century chose one that smiles. Not the beatific smile of altarpieces nor the enigmatic half-light of the Renaissance, but something new in European art: the quick, social, intelligent smile of conversation — the expression of a person who has just said something witty or is about to, caught across a table in good company. The man who fixed that expression for posterity — who caught it, sitter after sitter, for fifty years, in the most fugitive medium ever devised — was Maurice Quentin de La Tour, a musician's son from Picardy who never painted in oils, never painted a landscape, a history, or a still life, and became, with a box of coloured chalks, the definitive portraitist of the Enlightenment.

The claim is worth stating precisely, because it is not the usual kind of artistic greatness. La Tour had one subject — the human face at the moment of address — and one medium: pastel, pure powdered pigment pressed into sticks and stroked dry onto paper, the most immediate and most perishable of all painting's instruments. Within those limits he achieved something the grand machines of oil painting rarely approach: the sensation, still uncanny after two and a half centuries, that the sitter is about to speak — that the room's conversation paused a half-second ago and will resume the instant you look away. His contemporaries felt it as a kind of sorcery. Diderot, the first great art critic, circled the effect Salon after Salon; the sitters themselves — Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Alembert, Madame de Pompadour, the king of France — understood that this difficult, insolent, self-taught provincial was doing for their century what Holbein had done for another: issuing its faces to the future.

And the future very nearly did not receive them. Pastel is powder: it sits on the paper's tooth like frost, un-bound, ready to fall at a knock or smear at a touch; it cannot be varnished without dying, hardly travels, and fades under light. The medium's fragility has shaped everything about La Tour's afterlife — the works gathered behind glass in a handful of rooms (the Louvre, Saint-Quentin, Geneva, Dresden), rarely lent, unreproducible in their real quality — and it has shaped this essay's task too: La Tour must be written about with the technique constantly in view, because in no other great artist are the medium's physics and the art's meaning so nearly the same thing. Powder that holds a breath: that is pastel, and that is what he made of the eighteenth century.

The life makes a clean arc — provincial obscurity, conquest of Paris, decades at the summit, and a long strange coda of perfectionism curdling into madness, ending where it began, in Saint-Quentin, amid the century's most generous acts of philanthropy — and biography will have its chapters. But the essay's core is a double study: of a technique pushed further than anyone before or since dared push it, and of a social art — the portrait as the Enlightenment's own mirror, made in its salons, of its talkers, at the speed of its talk.

I. Saint-Quentin, Paris, and the crooked apprenticeship

Maurice Quentin de La Tour was born on 5 September 1704 in Saint-Quentin, a prosperous wool town on the Somme in Picardy, second son of François de La Tour, a musician — trumpeter and singer attached to the collegiate church — and his wife Reine Havart. The 'de' in the name was ornament, not nobility; the household was respectable, musical and modest. Of the childhood almost nothing is recorded except the essential: the boy drew, wanted nothing else, and met the standard paternal resistance — his father intended something solid. Around 1719, aged fifteen, he left for Paris more or less against his family's will, with the timing of genius: he arrived in a city that was, at just that moment, falling in love with his future medium.

The instrument of that love was a Venetian woman in her forties. Rosalba Carriera, Europe's most celebrated pastellist, spent 1720–21 in Paris as the guest of the financier Crozat, and her visit was a cultural event of the first order: the Regency's whole world of taste filed through her rooms; she pastelled the boy-king Louis XV; she was received — a woman, a foreigner, a worker in coloured chalk — into the Académie royale. Her soft, powdered, Venetian manner made pastel the fashion of the hour, and the fashion outlasted her visit: by the 1730s Paris supported a growing trade in pastel portraiture — quicker than oil, kinder to sitters (no smell, short sittings, immediate results), and flattering by its very texture, since powdered pigment renders powdered skin — the age wore make-up, and pastel was make-up, refined into art. Every account of La Tour's formation sets him in this Rosalba-tide; he himself, characteristically, claimed no master at all.

The training, such as it was, was scrappy: placed briefly with the painter Spoëde (a Flemish-trained academic of no distinction), possibly with the engraver-dealer world of the rue Saint-Jacques; a spell in Reims and — the biography's one adventure — a journey to London in the mid-1720s, where he seems to have worked some years in the portrait trade among the colony of French craftsmen. England mattered: it showed him a portrait market ruled by likeness and character rather than by academic hierarchy, and (biographers have long suspected) it showed him independence — the artist as free tradesman, negotiating his own terms — which became, in his later dealings with the French court, a doctrine no French painter had held so bluntly before. By about 1727 he was back in Paris, and through the 1730s he built his practice sitter by sitter, learning in public the medium he would master absolutely: the surviving early pastels show a hard, searching, linear manner — nothing of Rosalba's mist — already organised around the eyes and the mouth's beginning of speech.

Two events made the reputation. In 1735 he pastelled Voltaire — the philosophe at forty, the smile at its most dangerous, newly returned from his English exile — and the portrait, multiplied in versions and engravings, attached La Tour's name to the century's most famous face at exactly the moment that face became an industry. And in 1737 the Académie royale accepted him (agréé; full reception came in 1746, with the portrait of the painter Restout), which gave him the Salon: from its reopening in 1737 until 1773 he exhibited at almost every one, and the Salon — the new public square of French art, with its crowds, its pamphlets, its Diderot — was the theatre in which La Tour became not just fashionable but famous: the first portraitist whose exhibition pieces were events, argued over like plays. The provincial with no master had, by thirty-five, no rival either — save one, Perronneau, of whom more later; and the stage was set for the central decades, and the central chapters: the technique, and the gallery it built.

I bis. Portrait of a market: Paris in the 1730s

To measure what La Tour conquered, picture the portrait economy he entered. Paris around 1730 offered a face three routes to canvas. At the summit, the grand oil manner of Rigaud and Largillière — armour, velvet, allegory, the sitter as institution: slow, costly, and stiffening into formula as its founders aged. In the middle, the competent workshop trade — likenesses by the yard for the robe and the merchantry. And rising through both, the new intimacy: the portrait d'apparat yielding to the portrait of presence — smaller formats, plainer dress, the face closer and the address warmer — driven by the same social currents (salon culture, sensibility, the cult of conversation) that were reshaping literature. Pastel was this third current's natural instrument, and the 1720 Rosalba season had proved its market; what it lacked, after her departure, was a French master with the ambition to take it beyond the boudoir. The gap is exactly La Tour-shaped, and his filling of it looks, in retrospect, like strategy though it was surely instinct: he took the intimate medium and gave it the top route's scale and publicity — Rigaud's stage, Rosalba's materials, and a third thing all his own, the speaking face — so that by 1750 the pastel portrait was not oil's little sister but its rival at the Salon's centre, and the grand oil portraitists were learning from him (the mid-century's oils visibly soften, brighten and lean in, chasing the pastel effect). Media history knows the pattern — the marginal technology, socially undervalued, that captures the metropolis by doing one new thing (immediacy) better than the incumbent does anything: La Tour is its eighteenth-century case, and he ran the disruption's whole arc in one lifetime, monopoly and mania included.

A word, too, on what 'self-taught' meant in his case, since the no-master legend can mislead. He had teachers of record (Spoëde; the engraver Louis de Boullogne's circle's practices reached him at one remove) and he had, more importantly, the autodidact's true faculty: predatory looking. Contemporaries describe him haunting collections and studios, pumping colleagues, studying Rembrandt's lighting in engravings (the candlelit géométrie of some early pieces shows it) and the English mezzotints' soft gradations; the London years put the empirical English face-painters before him at formative age; and Rosalba's Paris examples, in Crozat's and the dealers' hands, were his true academy of surface. What he never acquired — academic figure-drawing's full apparatus, history-painting's machinery — he never needed: the bust-length talking face asks for anatomy of expression, not of limb, and there he trained himself past everyone, by the only method his art ever used: attention, at conversational range, sustained for sixty years.