VI. Riches, madness, and the return to Saint-Quentin

The worldly career was a triumph administered with maximum friction. La Tour's prices were the highest ever asked for portraits in France — and asked insolently: the fee named after the work was done, scaled to the sitter's rank and the artist's mood, refused entirely when the sitter displeased him; he kept financiers waiting years and abandoned works over slights. The fortune accumulated — invested with a Picard's care in annuities — and with it the eccentricities thickened: the philosophising at Versailles, the vanity (Diderot's pages glitter with it), the obsessive reworking of finished pastels that friends began to call a mania. From the 1770s the mania became clinical: he retouched masterpieces into ruin (contemporaries mourned specific works 'assassinated' by their maker), talked wildly, and slid, through the decade, into a documented derangement — modern writers speak cautiously of dementia — under which the family brought him home. In 1784, after nearly sixty Parisian years, the brother Jean-François conveyed him back to Saint-Quentin, where he lived out four twilight years, gentle and absent, dying on 17 February 1788 — eighteen months before the Bastille; the age of conversation's portraitist spared, by that margin, the sight of its end.

The coda transfigures the avarice. In his last lucid years and his will, the hoarded fortune poured out on his native town in the century's own enlightened forms: an endowed free school of drawing (the École gratuite de dessin, for artisans' sons), charitable foundations for poor women in childbirth, for aged artisans, prizes for virtue — Saint-Quentin's civic memory has him as le bienfaiteur before it has him as the pastellist. And the studio's contents — the préparations, the self-portraits, the unsold and unfinished — passed to the brother and thence to the town: the fonds that, housed eventually in the Musée Antoine-Lécuyer, made a Picard wool town one of art's essential pilgrimages. The museum's own history completes the story in the century France's north suffered: shelled to rubble in the First World War (the pastels, evacuated in time, survived), rebuilt around the collection in the 1930s — the fragile powder outlasting, by now, three regimes, two world wars and the building itself: Saint-Quentin keeps ninety-odd sheets of the eighteenth century's breath, and keeps them, as pastel demands, perfectly still.

The final years' clinical record, painful as it is, belongs to the account, for the age itself discussed it. The derangement seems to have advanced by stages through the late 1770s — first the reworking mania (visitors describe him scraping and re-attacking finished masterpieces, convinced they could be perfected; the Salon public had watched the habit grow for a decade), then wandering speech, grandiose schemes (he drafted treatises — on pastel, on politics, on the education of girls — that trail into incoherence), then the full eclipse in which the brother brought him home. Saint-Quentin's memories of the last years are gentle: the old man walked the ramparts, blessed children, occasionally asked after pictures he believed still on the easel. He signed his benefactions while capacity lasted — the drawing school's endowment dates from 1782, lucidity's last major act — and the town returned the care: the funeral of February 1788 was a civic event, and the eulogies, in the Enlightenment's own style, praised the philanthropist and the artist in one breath, bienfaisance and génie, the century's two favourite words closing over their best portraitist eighteen months before the century itself closed.

His grave and its aftermath complete the record with an unexpected coda. Buried in Saint-Quentin's church of Saint-André, his remains were displaced by the town's later history and rediscovered — with reasonable certainty — in the twentieth century's excavations; they rest now in the basilica, marked, a benefactor's homecoming twice over. The estate's dispersal followed the will's mixture of precision and charity: the annuities to the foundations, the works to the brother, the brother's collection eventually to the town — an unusually clean transmission by any old master's standard, and the reason the fonds survived intact where other artists' studios scattered at death: the miser's habits, one last time, serving posterity — he had kept everything, and everything, kept, became the museum.

VI ter. Saint-Quentin: the fonds, the war, and the rooms

Because Saint-Quentin is to La Tour what Delft is to Vermeer — the place where the work concentrates into pilgrimage — the essay walks it briefly. The fonds La Tour descends from the studio's contents via the brother Jean-François: some ninety works, préparations above all — the philosophes (Rousseau, d'Alembert, the abbé Huber), the court (the dauphin's family, the maréchal de Saxe), the theatre (Marie Fel, the dancer Camargo, the actor grimacing mid-role), the self-portraits from cocky youth to broken age — plus finished masterpieces (the Fel of 1757, the smiling Abbé Huber reading) and the touching residue of practice: unfinished sheets, trial papers, the tools. Housed first in the town hall, the collection passed in the nineteenth century into the museum built on the collector Antoine Lécuyer's bequest, and became what it remains: the only place on earth where La Tour's working mind can be walked through — Salon machines and five-minute faces in one suite of quiet rooms.

The twentieth century nearly ended it. Saint-Quentin sat on the Somme front: occupied in 1914, systematically shelled, the town was eighty per cent rubble by 1918 and the museum a shell — but the pastels had gone: evacuated (via Maubeuge and Paris, in one of French heritage administration's quiet triumphs) and returned, intact, to a rebuilt museum inaugurated in the 1930s. The survival deserves its emphasis in any account of the artist: the most fragile major œuvre in European art rode out the century's worst artillery war because a few officials moved fast in 1914 and 1917 — dust, again, outlasting iron. The rooms today are as the essay's coda describes them: domestic in scale, lined with faces at talking distance, the préparations hung in ranks like a seminar of the dead; the visitor-book's recurring entry, in every language, is some version of the same sentence — they look back. Amiens (the Musée de Picardie, with the great self-portrait) and the Louvre complete the French triangle; Geneva, Dresden, Stockholm and the American museums hold the diaspora; but Picardy holds the man — benefactor's plaques on the schools, the museum on its quiet street, and the name, in his town, still meaning first the gift and then the art. (The town's basilica keeps the parish registers of his baptism; the drawing school he endowed ran into the twentieth century and its successor institutions still teach; and the lycée bears his name — the benefactor's afterlife, in the French civic manner, spelled out in street-signs.)