Portraiture

At the age of 23, after garnering a few commissions in London, Maurice Quentin de La Tour set himself up as a portraitist in Paris. The year was 1727, and Anglophilia was becoming fashionable in the court at Versailles.

La Tour, though a native of Picardy, cannily proclaimed himself an English painter. Pastel portraiture was all the rage. Only seven years before, the Italian pastelist Rosalba Carriera had visited Paris and found duchesses and princesses imploring her to do their portraits. La Tour* prudently devoted himself entirely to pastels.

Not long afterwards, a counselor to Louis XV wrote admiringly that "La Tour is becoming the portraitist a la mode." Louis summoned La Tour to Versailles, where he limned the monarch's handsome features, as well as those of the royal family and Madame de Pompadour. Other commissions naturally followed. Along with other prominent painters of the day, he was soon awarded quarters in the Louvre, which then served as a royally endowed artists' colony. In 1750 Louis named him official court painter.

Satins & Smiles. It was an age of spectacular superficiality, of fetes and fireworks, of lords and ladies alike bedecked in paints, powders and silk. La Tour portrayed his clients as they wished to see themselves, studiously recording their brilliant satins and laces, ignoring the facial lines of aging noblemen and their mistresses. But he was enough of an ironist not to ignore their unreal smiles and bored, malicious eyes.

La Tour shared the cynical nationalism and lust for learning of his friends Voltaire and Rousseau. He refused the Order of St. Michael because of his egalitarian principles. He delved into science, mathematics, politics, theology, philosophy and poetry, and took up the study of Latin at 55. When he retired to the country, senile at 80, he endowed homes for indigent mothers and passionately adopted a pantheism that sent him roaming the countryside, embracing and talking to the trees. He died in 1788, the year before the society he chronicled.

Democratic Tyrant. With his sitters, La Tour was the most democratic of tyrants. Portraits of the King's daughters were never finished--in order to punish them for failing to keep appointments. La Tour once threatened to walk out of his studio when the King tried to watch him sketching la Pompadour. "My talent," he proudly maintained, "belongs to me." Nowhere was it better displayed than in his self-portraits, in which the illusion of reality is so strong, marveled one 18th century critic, that "it seems as though nature had painted itself." One of the three that survive, showing La Tour at his prime at 50 (see color), was auctioned off at Sotheby's in London last week on behalf of a Bolivian diplomat. An anonymous buyer paid $56,000 for it.

*No kin to the 17th century French Painter Georges de La Tour.

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