Maurice Quentin de La Tour 19. Préparation for a Portrait of the Abbé Reynal (1713 – 1796), ca. 1750 – 55 Pastel on paper, 12½ x 95/8 in. (31.8 x 24.4 cm). Private collection
20. Préparation for a Portrait of Mademoiselle Dangeville (Marie Anne Botot, 1714 – 1796), ca. 1750 Pastel on blue paper, laid down on canvas; 113/8 x 91/8 in. (29 x 23.3 cm). The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Purchased on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Fund, 1978 (1981.12)
Comédie Française from 1730 until 1763. A labeled black chalk drawing showing her smiling face in three-quarter view is in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and a pastel made from the drawing is in Saint-Quentin. In both works her cheeks are wider and her brow lower than the sitter’s here. What is most striking about this study is the way it preserves the lively warmth of this engaging woman’s character, whoever she may be. La Tour used his favorite blue to great effect. The voids between the strokes at the hairline indicate the volume of her hair, and contour strokes varying in color and thickness suggest a shade of thought or motion.
inventions. These substances were advertised in journals or demonstrated in the forums of learned societies, whose endorsements inspired public confidence and sales. The proceedings of the Académie Royale record several diverse inventions meant to solidify pastel without altering its distinctive surface bloom. The most famous of them, also reported by Chaperon in his Traité, was the “secret” fixative the mécanicien du roi (mechanical engineer to the king) Antoine-Joseph Loriot first presented in 1763 (though its secret was not revealed until 1780). Loriot demonstrated his fixative’s invisibility to the Académie by coating it on only half of the pastel portrait of Loriot himself that the painter Jean Valade had exhibited at the Salon that year (it is now in the Musée Antoine Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin). Another approbation was given for paper sponged with “special” oil that stabilized the powder and conferred on it the consistency of oil painting. Still other promoters claimed that their fixatives allowed pastels to be rubbed with the finger without being displaced or to be varnished (thus eliminating the need for protective glass), cleaned, or retouched. For pastels that had lost their vivacity, there were fixatives that could regenerate colors and “recover a new luster.” La Tour boasted that his brilliant pastels were fixed with his special recipe, which impaired neither nuances nor freshness. So vibrant were his pastels that Salon critic Abbé Le Blanc reverentially predicted in 1747 that they would “last as long as is given to human things to last.” The importance of fixatives both commercially and as demonstrations of practical science is supported by the numerous accounts of their availability, 31