II. Powder and breath: the technique of pastel, and what La Tour did to it

The medium itself

Pastel is the simplest paint there is and the strangest. Take pure pigment — the same earths, minerals and lakes that oil painting grinds into linseed — bind it with the least possible gum or chalk, roll it into a stick, and dry it: the result is colour in its rawest usable state, applied without brush, medium, dilution or drying time, direct from hand to surface. Nothing intervenes between pigment and eye — no yellowing oil, no varnish gloss: this is why pastels, protected from light, keep a freshness oil paintings lose in a generation, and why their colour has a bloom, a matte breathing softness, that no other medium approaches. The price is bondlessness. The powder sits on the surface, gripped only by the tooth of the support; every stroke is final (true erasure is impossible — the tooth, once filled, is dead); the finished work can be destroyed by a sneeze, a shake in a carriage, a clumsy framer; and 'fixing' it with sprayed resins — the century tried; the inventor Loriot's secret process was demonstrated to the Académie — deadens exactly the powder-bloom that is the medium's soul. La Tour experimented with fixatives all his life and trusted none fully; his real answers were glass, immobility, and the century's best framers.

The support of choice was blue paper — the strong rag paper whose cool tone served as a middle value, working for the flesh-tints as the toned grounds of oil painters worked — mounted on stretched canvas like a painting; large works were assembled from several sheets, their joins managed under the drawing (the Pompadour's full-length is a mosaic of them). On the paper's tooth the pastellist works from the stick's point and side: hatching, dragging, layering; softening with the finger, the stump, the crumb of bread; building crumbling opacities in the lights and letting the paper breathe through the darks. Flesh is the great test — powdered pigment must become moist skin, wet eye, breath-parted lip — and the eighteenth century's pastellists developed for it a connoisseurship of touch as refined as anything in art: Rosalba's fused sfumato; Perronneau's shimmering broken colour, blues and greens scribbled through a cheek; and La Tour's way, which contemporaries and technical study agree on — drawing, always drawing: a construction of strokes, kept alive to the end, tightening to near-invisible fusion in the face's centre and loosening to open calligraphy at wig, coat and ground, so that every portrait enacts, across its own surface, a focusing of attention. Where Rosalba's surfaces are weather, La Tour's are argument.

His procedure with colour deserves the paragraph technical writers give it. The La Tour flesh-tone is built as a woven system: an under-lattice of surprising hues — greens, blues, violets laid into the shadow side of a cheek — over which the carnations are hatched and only centrally fused, so that at viewing distance the complexion vibrates with an interior life no premixed tint achieves; the Impressionists' divided colour is here, a century early, in the service of skin. The eyes get the finest machinery: the iris built in concentric touches, the crucial catch-light placed with a single loaded stroke (and often a second, fainter, on the lower lid's moisture — the detail that makes his sitters look recently amused), the lids' shadows warmed so the eye sits in living tissue. And everywhere the blue paper is a player — cool middle tone under the wig's greys, atmosphere behind the head, its reserve declaring, at every edge, that this face is drawn, present tense, on a sheet: the medium showing its hand was part of the address — nothing between you and the making, as nothing between you and the sitter.

The préparations

His working method produced, almost as a by-product, a second œuvre the modern eye prizes above the first. La Tour worked the face from life in rapid sessions — the sitter talking, kept talking, provoked into animation (he was famous for the running conversation, impertinent and hilarious, that was really a technique for holding the expression he wanted) — and these sessions yielded the préparations: studies of the face alone, on smallish sheets, the features seized in a few dozen strokes with the wig a ghost and the dress nothing at all. The finished pastel was then built at leisure — costume, hands, setting, the Salon machine — around a face transferred from, or checked against, the préparation. Saint-Quentin's museum holds scores of them, the studio's working stock, never sold; and their afterlife is one of taste's great reversals: to the nineteenth century they were curiosities; to the twentieth and twenty-first they are the essential La Tour — faces of astonishing immediacy, the smile still wet, the sitter unarmoured — 'the truest portraits of the eighteenth century' in many a modern account, preferred to the finished works exactly as Claude's drawings came to be preferred by some to his paintings. The Goncourt brothers, pastel's Romantic rediscoverers, put it permanently: in the préparations La Tour 'surprises the soul in déshabillé.'

Scale, ambition, and the Pompadour

Pastel's natural size is the head; its natural genre, intimacy. La Tour, constitutionally incapable of accepting a limit, drove the medium to the scale and rhetoric of grand-manner oil: full-lengths, life-size, with still-life, furniture and iconographic program complete. The summit is the full-length of Madame de Pompadour (Salon of 1755; now in the Louvre): the marquise in her cabinet, surrounded by the emblems of her mind — the Encyclopédie on the table beside Voltaire's Henriade and Montesquieu, the music open on her lap (she had sung; the score is real), the portfolio of engravings, the globe — a manifesto of enlightened patronage five feet high, in powder. It took him years, to the marquise's documented exasperation (the correspondence about sittings, delays and the artist's terms survives); the head was done from life and married — visibly, say sharp modern eyes — onto the constructed apparatus; and the whole is at once the medium's greatest machine and its self-exposure: pastel straining against its nature and winning, but at a cost of assembly the préparations never pay. The public triumph was total; the debate it opened — is the great La Tour the machine or the sketch? — is the La Tour literature's permanent question, and this catalogue's entries take it up piece by piece.

The physics of a fragile eternity

One more technical truth completes the chapter, because it governs how we meet him now. Pastel does not age like painting; it either survives intact or perishes. Kept dark and still, unfixed powder outlasts oil's chemistry — La Tours in Saint-Quentin and Geneva look, behind their glass, as if finished this morning; the blues Rosalba's oils-rivals lost to time still sing. But light bleaches the lakes, travel shakes powder from tooth, and glass-breakage is death; so the pastels do not tour, the great holdings are effectively immovable, and every La Tour exhibition is a local event built around what a museum already owns (the Louvre's 2018 pastel exhibition showed its own hundred; Saint-Quentin's fonds anchor all La Tour scholarship in one Picard town). The consequence for reputation has been real: the artist who cannot circulate cannot be canonised by blockbuster, and La Tour's modern fame runs strangely below his importance — a condition his admirers, from the Goncourts to Neil Jeffares (whose online Dictionary of Pastellists is the field's great modern instrument), have spent two centuries correcting. The essay states the correction plainly: within his chosen ground — the face, addressed — La Tour is one of the supreme portraitists of European art, and the ground was not small: it was the Enlightenment.

II bis. The Salon years: a chronicle of conquest

The skeleton of the great decades deserves flesh, and the Salon record supplies it — the biennial exhibitions were La Tour's stage, and his entries can be followed like a serial performance.

He arrived at the Salon of 1737 with, among other pieces, the Self-portrait 'à l'œil de bœuf' — the young man laughing under his round window, a manifesto of the new informality — and the Présidente de Rieux pieces followed in the early 1740s: the magistrate's wife in ball-dress with her mask (now at the Cognacq-Jay), the magistrate himself in his study — the full-length Gabriel Bernard de Rieux (now the Getty's treasure) — pastel suddenly performing at the scale and pomp of state portraiture, to public astonishment. Reception at the Académie came in 1746 (with the portrait of the painter Restout; La Tour, typically, delayed and quarrelled over his morceau de réception for years), and the official summit followed: named peintre du roi, pensioned, lodged eventually in the Louvre's artists' quarters — the establishment absorbing, with what grace it could find, an artist constitutionally unabsorbable.

The Salons of 1748–1755 were the imperial phase. In 1748 the Maréchal de Saxe, victor of Fontenoy, at full military splendour; around 1750 the great self-portraits and the d'Alembert circle; 1753, the annus mirabilis — Rousseau, d'Alembert, the Duclos, a wall of philosophes that made the Salon, contemporaries joked, an Encyclopédie in coloured dust; and 1755, the Pompadour — the exhibition's sensation and the medium's Everest, the pastel against which all pastel ambition has been measured since. Perronneau answered biennially from the next wall; Diderot began keeping score in 1759; and Paris took sides as Paris does — the duels of les deux pastellistes were a fixture of Salon pamphleteering for two decades.

After 1760 the rhythm slows and the tone changes. The court work continued (the Saxony dauphine's family, the children of France), the prices climbed still higher, but the entries thin; the reworking mania was consuming finished pieces (Salon critics began to note pastels seen before, altered, not improved), and the last regular appearances in the 1760s show the gallery turning inward — himself, Marie Fel, old friends. He exhibited little after 1769 and stopped by 1773; the fifteen years of production left to him vanish almost entirely into the studio, into the retouching, and into the fonds Saint-Quentin now keeps: the public career ends, characteristically, not with a farewell piece but with a slow withdrawal into the workshop, the machine still running with no audience but its keeper. (One Salon story preserves the flavor of the imperial years: crowds pressed so thick before his wall in 1753 that the guards were doubled, and a pamphleteer complained that one could hear the pastels being talked to — visitors answering the portraits' address aloud, the century's politest hallucination, and the best review any portraitist ever received.)

Two institutional notes complete the chronicle. First, the Académie de Saint-Luc and the provincial academies (Amiens, his Picard neighbours) claimed him eagerly — he was a national possession by mid-century, and knew it. Second, the engravers: La Tour's images multiplied through the century's print trade (the Voltaires and Rousseaus above all), and the engraving-rights economy — artist, sitter and publisher negotiating the face's reproduction — made him one of the first portraitists whose work functioned as media: the Salon showed the original; the print-shops broadcast it; Europe formed its mental pictures of the philosophes at one remove from his chalk.

II ter. A note on the man at home

Between the anecdotes of insolence and the clinical end, the private texture is worth a paragraph. He lived for decades in the rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs and then in Louvre lodgings, among a circle more literary than painterly — the abbés and encyclopédistes of his gallery were dinner company, not just clients; he read philosophy seriously and inflicted his own (Marmontel's memoirs preserve, with affectionate exasperation, the metaphysical monologues); he never married, kept his union with Marie Fel in the discreet form their century's theatre-adjacent liaisons took; and money, until the final philanthropy, ran through the accounts of a careful rentier — the avarice legend rests on real ledgers. The brothers mattered: Charles, the soldier; above all Jean-François, the chevalier, companion of the last years and executor of the benefactions. Politically he was a liberal of the reform decades — the recorded outbursts at Versailles (taxation, the navy, the poor) were tactless précis of encyclopédiste positions — and Saint-Quentin's schools were their practical conclusion. The portraitist of conversation was, in sum, a conversationalist — brilliant, exhausting, generous late: his sitters' verdict on him matched his portraits of them, presence first, repose never.

II quater. The materials: an inventory of dust

The technique chapter owes the reader its bill of goods, for pastel's material culture was an industry with its own geography. The sticks themselves were manufactured — by colourmen in Paris, by celebrated makers in Lausanne and later in England — from pigment, filler (chalk, pipe-clay) and the minimum of gum tragacanth, in graded series: each hue in a run from saturated to near-white, so that a working pastellist's box held not dozens but hundreds of sticks — La Tour's generation worked from cabinets of them, arranged like an organ's registers, and the medium's characteristic modelling (colour lightened by a paler stick, never by added white on the sheet) depends on that arsenal. The palette had its dangers: the fugitive lakes (carmines that a decade of daylight kills) sat beside stable earths, and the pastellists knew it — sitters' red lips and cheeks have faded differentially in many surviving works, one reason the préparations, less 'finished' with fragile reds, often look fresher than the machines. The support industry mattered equally: the blue papers came from specific mills (the same rag-blues the drawings trade prized), sheets were joined and mounted on strainers by specialist monteurs, and the framer — glass cut large, spacers keeping powder from pane, the sealed back — was not a finisher but a co-conservator: an eighteenth-century pastel that survives owes half its life to its first framing. Glass itself was the luxury component — plate glass at portrait scale cost real money, one more reason pastel's market sat at the top of society — and the whole apparatus travelled badly, so the trade was metropolitan by physics as well as fashion: the pastellist worked where the clients were, and the works stayed where they were made. Modern conservation science has added the postscript: examinations of La Tours (the Louvre's and Getty's published studies) map his layerings, his local fixings (he fixed lightly, in passages, a discovered secret — binding under-layers while leaving the surface bloom free), his repairs and reworkings — the mania legible in stratigraphy — and confirm the paradox the essay opened with: kept still and dark, the dust is immortal; the medium's enemies were never time, only motion and light.