Works by Maurice Quentin de La Tour

Maurice Quentin de La Tour made his portraits in pastel: Louis XV, Voltaire, Rousseau, and himself over and over, often smiling.

At the Salon of 1737 he showed Madame Boucher, wife of the painter François Boucher, and a laughing self-portrait, the first of 150 portraits he would show there over the next 36 years. In the Louvre's self-portrait with a pointing finger, from about 1737, he grins and points off to the side. The Art Institute's self-portrait of the same years works up only the face, a faint smile on it, and leaves the greenish-tan paper bare around it.

All the works below are portraits, and some are little more than a head: the Met's preparation for a portrait of Louis XV is the king's face on blue paper, eyes turned aside. At the other extreme is Gabriel Bernard de Rieux, seated full length in the robes of his office at the Parliament of Paris, beside a globe, books and a patterned screen, and pieced together from several sheets of paper laid on canvas. His teacher Claude Dupouch rests an arm on a chair back in front of an easel.

Contemporaries found him lively and eccentric, but he was nervous and exacting, and he has been described as working his portraits over until he spoiled them. As commissions made him rich he founded a drawing school in Saint-Quentin, where he was born, and he retired there at 80 as mental illness closed in.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, J. Paul Getty Museum, Louvre, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art.