The Metropolitan

Museum of Art
Bulletin
Spring 2011
Pastel Portraits
Images of 18th-Century Europe

Katharine Baetjer

Marjorie Shelley

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

 Acknowledgments

This publication was made possible through the generosity The exhibition this Bulletin accompanies, “Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-Century
of the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund for The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, established by the cofounder of Reader’s Europe,” has been underwritten by the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund, whose support
Digest. we gratefully acknowledge. Funds provided by Karen B. Cohen, an invaluable and
Additional support has been provided by Karen B. Cohen. informed friend of the Departments of Drawings and Prints and Paper Conservation,
The exhibition “Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-Century have made possible a Bulletin issue that is longer than the standard forty-eight pages.
Europe” will be held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Howard and Sally Lepow purchased for the Department of Paper Conservation and
New York, from May 17 to August 14, 2011.
for display in the exhibition a splendid set of traditionally made French pastel crayons.
The exhibition is made possible by the Gail and Parker
Gilbert Fund. Our greatest debt is to our lenders: The Horvitz Collection, Boston; The Pierpont
Morgan Library, New York; The Frick Collection, New York; Princeton University
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Spring 2011
Volume LXVIII, Number 4 Art Museum; the New-York Historical Society; Yale Center for British Art, New
Copyright © 2011 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Haven; and all those who prefer to remain anonymous. We know of no other
New York
eighteenth-century pastel exhibitions in the United States, certainly none in recent
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (ISSN 0026-1521) years, and the several important exhibitions of the kind that were held in Paris are
is published quarterly by The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028-0198. well beyond living memory.
Periodicals postage paid at New York NY and additional For their interest in this project from its inception and for their help we would like
mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes
to Membership Department, The Metropolitan Museum to thank Guy Wildenstein and Joseph Baillio of Wildenstein and Co., Inc., New
of Art Bulletin, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028- York. Jean-Luc Baroni of Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd, London, has made possible the loan
0198. Four weeks’ notice required for change of address.
The Bulletin is provided as a benefit to Museum members from abroad of magnificent pastels by Hugh Douglas Hamilton and Joseph Wright.
and is available by subscription. Subscriptions $30.00 a Among museum colleagues we thank especially Amy Meyers and Scott Wilcox of the
year. Back issues available on microfilm from National
Archive Publishing Company, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and James Christen Steward and Laura M.
Arbor, MI 48106. Volumes I–XXXVII (1905–42) available
Giles of the Princeton University Art Museum. Others who have given us assistance
as a clothbound reprint set or as individual yearly volumes
from Ayer Company Publishers, Suite b-213, 400 Bedford of various kinds include Hervé Aaron, Colin B. Bailey, Mark Brady, Alvin L. Clark Jr.,
Street, Manchester, NH 03101, or from the Metropolitan
Elisabeth Fairman, William M. Griswold, Diana Howard, Sarah Miller, Louise
Museum, 66-26 Metropolitan Avenue, Middle Village, NY
11381-0001. Mirrer, Mary Lublin, Edgar Munhall, Roberta J. M. Olson, Anne L. Poulet, Alan Salz,
Jennifer Tonkovich, George Wachter, Bradley Whitehurst, and Alan Wintermute,
Publisher and Editor in Chief: Mark Polizzotti
Associate Publisher and General Manager: Gwen Roginsky not one of whom greeted with skepticism the possibility of a pastels loan exhibition.
Editor of the Bulletin: Sue Potter
Production Manager: Christopher Zichello
At the Metropolitan Museum we have received the impeccable support to which we
Designer: Bruce Campbell are accustomed from Thomas P. Campbell, Director, Carrie Rebora Barratt, Associate
Front cover: Jean Baptiste Perronneau, Olivier Journu
Director for Collections and Administration, and Jennifer Russell, Associate Director
(1724–1764), 1756 (see no. 21, pages 32 – 33). Back cover: for Exhibitions; from George R. Goldner, Constance McPhee, and Perrin V. Stein in
Detail of Charles Antoine Coypel, Double Portrait
Presumed to Represent François de Jullienne and His Wife,
Drawings and Prints; from Keith Christiansen in European Paintings; from Morrison
1743 (see frontispiece, pages 4 – 5). H. Heckscher in The American Wing; from Martin Bansbach and Mary Jo Carson in
Unless otherwise specified, photographs are reproduced
Paper Conservation; from Dorothy Mahon in Paintings Conservation; from Mechthild
with the permission of the owners of the works of art, Baumeister in Objects Conservation; from Kenneth Soehner and his staff in the
who hold the copyright thereto. We have made every
effort to obtain permissions for copyright-protected
Thomas J. Watson Library; from Linda Sylling, Daniel Kershaw, and Kamomi Solidum
images. If you have copyright-protected work in this in Special Exhibitions, Gallery Installations, and Design; from Barbara Bridgers and
publication and you have not given us permission, please
contact the Metropolitan Museum’s Editorial Department. Juan Trujillo in the Photograph Studio; from Mark Polizzotti, Gwen Roginsky, Sue
Photographs of works in the Museum’s collection are by Potter, Christopher Zichello, Bruce Campbell, Marcie Muscat, and Elizabeth Zechella
the Photograph Studio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art;
photographer: Juan Trujillo. Additional credits: no. 12: in Editorial; from Nina S. Maruca in the Registrar’s Office; and from Mary Flanagan
© President and Fellows of Harvard College, photograph in Communications. We acknowledge as well the help of Carole Blumenfeld, Isabelle
by Rick Stafford; no. 24: © 2010 Christie’s Images Limited;
no. 31: photograph by Bruce M. White. Roché, Jenene Garey, Alice Haas, and Pamela Wilson. Francesca Whitlum-Cooper,
graduate intern in the Department of European Paintings in 2010, assisted with the
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, preparations for this exhibition and wrote the text devoted to Liotard in this Bulletin.
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, record­ing,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without per-
mission in writing from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Katharine Baetjer, Curator, European Paintings
Printed and bound in the United States of America. Marjorie Shelley, Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge, Paper Conservation
Director’s Note

With the bequest in 1929 of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, the Metropolitan Museum came
to possess a small but important group of French and American pastels of the nine-
teenth century, some twenty works in this medium by Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet,
and Mary Cassatt. These were incorporated into, and shown with, the nineteenth-
century French and American paintings collections, and our holdings of pastels as
well as of paintings of the period continued to grow. By contrast, it was not until 1956
that we received from the New York dealer Martin Birnbaum our first eighteenth-
century European example, A Shipwreck during a Tempest, painted in Portugal in 1782
by the French artist Jean Baptiste Pillement. In 1961, 1967, and 1975 the Museum was
given and bequeathed five pastel portraits by and one attributed to the English pas-
telist John Russell (1745–1806).
There the matter stood until 2002, when we were able to buy at auction our first
and to date only Rosalba Carriera pastel, a portrait of the young Lord Boyne wear-
ing Venetian carnival costume. In the years since 2002 we have purchased works by
a half-dozen Italian, German, French, and British pastelists, including Benedetto
Luti, Anton Raphael Mengs, Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jean Baptiste Perron-
neau, and Joseph Wright, and we have received as gifts a further work by La Tour
and a portrait of Madame Élisabeth de France by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. We have
just bought with funds from Mrs. Charles Wrightsman a splendid double portrait
by Charles Antoine Coypel, which serves as the frontispiece for this publication.
This Bulletin and the exhibition it accompanies, “Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-
Century Europe,” are the collaborative work of Katharine Baetjer, Curator in the
Department of European Paintings, and Marjorie Shelley, Sherman Fairchild Con-
servator in Charge, Sherman Fairchild Center for Works on Paper and Photographs
Conservation.
It is with pleasure that I thank the lenders, many of whom have chosen to remain
anonymous, and the sponsors, notably the Gail and Parker Gilbert Fund, of the exhi-
bition for which this Bulletin serves as the catalogue. We are grateful to Karen B.
Cohen for her important support of this publication. And I wish to express our par-
ticular gratitude to Joseph Baillio for his interest in and many contributions to this
project.
I also recognize those who have supported the growth of our nascent eighteenth-
century European pastels collection: Mary Tavener Holmes, Mrs. Frederick M.
Stafford, the late Mrs. Walter Annenberg, and the inimitable Mrs. Charles Wrightsman.
It is a delight to see these delicate works of art on view in our galleries, as their sensi-
tivity to light prohibits any long-term installation. This exhibition will allow our
audience a brief, but surely satisfying, visit with them.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

4
Painting in the Dry Manner
The Flourishing of Pastel in 18th-Century Europe
M ar jor i e S h e l l e y

E
veryone has a crayon in his hand — as with all that is fashionable, the
public has embraced it with a frenzy,” Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne
wrote in August 1746 in a review of the Salon paintings on display at the
Musée du Louvre in Paris. Indeed, by the mid-eighteenth century pastel had
reached an unprecedented level of acclaim as an artistic medium. It was appreci-
ated for its stylistic diversity, the naturalism it evoked, its strength of color, and
its suitability for informal portraits, the subject matter for which it was most
frequently employed. Many material and practical factors also contributed to
this resounding reception: the distinctive surface light and brilliant, nonyellow-
ing colors of pastel portraits, the simplicity of the tools they required, the relative
speed with which they could be executed, and their agreeable scale all underlay
the ubiquitous demand for these likenesses. And each of these features was
inseparably tied to the dustlike nature of pastel  —  powdered pigment formed
into small sticks of opaque dry color — which in turn dictated the distinctive
Charles Antoine Coypel
palette and techniques of the medium as well as the supports on which the frag-
(French, Paris 1694–1752 Paris) ile material was applied and the protection given its surface.
Double Portrait Presumed to Represent That pastel flourished in the eighteenth century must be ascribed not only to
François de Jullienne and His Wife, 1743 its aesthetic desirability but to the emergence of a prosperous buying public, a
Pastel, black chalk, and watercolor on four joined sheets cultural climate that encouraged technology and innovation, and a burgeoning
of handmade blue laid paper, laid down on canvas; 39⅜ x
31½ in. (100 x 80 cm). Signed and dated at right on chair trade in artists’ materials, notably crayons, paper, glass, and fixatives. During the
frame: C Coypel 1743. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715) pastel had been employed for grand royal por-
Purchase, Mrs. Charles Wrightsman Gift, in honor of
Annette de la Renta, 2011 (2011.84) traits, but in the early 1720s a shift occurred, sparked by the intimate crayon like-
nesses introduced by Rosalba Carriera during her brief sojourn in Paris in
The academician Charles Antoine Coypel was 1720–21. The smaller works Carriera inspired suited the taste and elegant decor of
appointed first painter to King Louis XV of the new aristocracy.
France in 1747. His oeuvre includes portraits,
satirical caricatures, and genre scenes, in addition Perhaps the most fundamental material factor that accounted for the wide-
to historical and religious subjects in the grand spread popularity of portraits in pastel was the increased availability of ready-
manner. His exceptional pastels are few in number
(see also nos. 9, 10). This double portrait, a recent made crayons. As famed Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens noted in a letter of
acquisition, is among Coypel’s latest and most May 30, 1663, and French painter and theoretician Roger de Piles remarked in
accomplished: it displays his dazzling and unerr-
ing control of a variety of materials, principally his Premiers élémens de la peinture pratique in 1684, it was possible to purchase
pastel but also chalk and watercolor. Traditionally, ready-made crayons in the 1660s. Their commercial production was limited,
the sitters are identified as François de Jullienne
(1722–1754) and his evidently very young wife,
however. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, trade in crayons had
Marie Élisabeth de Séré de Rieux (1724–1795). proliferated. As pastelists steadily gained in stature and dissociated themselves
They married in 1741. François was the son of Jean
de Jullienne, a wealthy textile merchant, collector
from the mechanical tasks of their métier, the fabrication of the colors, once car-
of paintings, and patron of Antoine Watteau. ried out in the ateliers for the artists’ own use, was handed over to independent

5
Benedetto Luti Benedetto Luti was born in Florence and settled admitted to the Accademia di San Luca in 1694
(Italian, Florence 1666 – 1724 Rome) in 1690 in Rome, where he established a drawing and was elected its principe in 1720. A painter,
academy and enjoyed the protection of Cosimo III draftsman, and pastelist, he was a pioneer of the
1. Study of a Boy in a Blue Jacket, 1717 de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. Earlier he had Roman Rococo. He was also a dealer and owned
Pastel and chalk on blue laid paper, laid down on paste studied with the Florentine painter Domenico an important collection of drawings and prints
paper; 16 x 13 in. (40.6 x 33 cm). Signed and dated on Gabbiani (1652 – 1726), who had also stayed for a that he showed to visiting connoisseurs. Busy
backing: Roma 1717  / Il Caual [iere]  / Benedetto Luti fece. time in Rome and then returned to Florence in with these multifarious activities, he was not
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gwynne Andrews the 1680s to enter the employ of Cosimo’s son, terribly prolific.
Fund, 2007 (2007.360) Ferdinando. In 1670, on a visit to France, Cosimo Luti’s highly colored pastels, usually relatively
had visited the studio of Robert Nanteuil, a well- small in scale, were admired by his contemporaries,
known portraitist in pastel and colored chalks, and who saw in them the influence of Correggio and
from that time on the grand duke encouraged the Federico Barocci. They are the earliest finished
practice of pastel portraiture in Tuscany. Nothing works in this medium in Italy. His pastels fall into
is known of Luti’s early style, but eventually these three groups: portraits, bearded male heads thought
strains of influence seem to have come together to represent apostles, and studies from young male
in his work after he arrived in Rome. Luti was or female models. All are highly expressive and

6
although limited in number form a characteris- Luti may have presented such studies to im- Benedetto Luti
tic aspect of his oeuvre. These two sheets dated portant clients, including foreign visitors. In 1716,
1717, with their contrasting palettes and identical for example, he offered two drawings of young 2. Study of a Girl in Red, 1717
inscriptions on the original backings, seem always women in colored chalks to Viscount Coke, later Pastel and chalk on blue laid paper, laid down on paste
to have been a pair, but nothing is known of their 1st Earl of Leicester. (They remain in the hands paper; 16½ x 133/8 in. (41.9 x 34 cm). Signed and dated
earlier history except that they were together in of his descendants at Holkham Hall, Norfolk.) on backing: Roma 1717  / Il Caual [iere].  / Benedetto Luti
England a century or more ago. The sultry girl in Grand Prince Ferdinando kept a pastel head of a fece. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gwynne
red holding a picture or a mirror, her dark blond young woman by Luti in his private rooms in the Andrews Fund, 2007 (2007.361)
hair touched with butter-colored highlights, is an Palazzo Pitti, and another (now in the Galleria
unusual type for Luti. The boy wearing a blue coat degli Uffizi, Florence) belonged to the Medici
conveys the disarming directness and sweetness collection at Poggio Imperiale. Yet another was in
of a child. This is the best of a number of versions, the Walpole collection in 1779, when it was sold
both painted and drawn, of study heads of the to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia; it is
boy; none of the others exhibits the same intensity now in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint
of glance, brightness of tone, variety of colors and Petersburg.
shapes, or tensile strength in the strokes.

7
artisans. Responding to both artists’ and sitters’ desire for portraits in pastel that Rosalba Carriera
(Italian, Venice 1673 – 1757 Venice)
emulated oil paintings, specialist pastel makers producing an ever broadening
3. Young Woman with Pearl Earrings, ca. 1720
palette of crayons established themselves in cities across Europe.
Pastel on paper, 125/8 x 105/8 in. (32 x 27 cm). Private
Advances in glass technology also helped fuel the demand for portraits in collection
dry color. Although they were never executed on panel or directly on canvas,
works in pastel were regarded as a type of painting. The need to protect these
Rosalba Carriera was born in Venice, probably in
powdery surfaces, however, had limited their dimensions to the small size (rarely 1673. She had two sisters, Giovanna, who was her
exceeding 29 by 17 inches) of the sheets cut from hand-blown crown glass. assistant, and Angela, who married the painter
Antonio Pellegrini. Rosalba corresponded with
During the late 1680s a pouring process developed by the French royal glass- Benedetto Luti and with the miniaturist Felice
works (established in 1665 as one of the economic reforms of Louis XIV’s min- Ramelli, but she was probably largely self-taught.
According to tradition, she began painting the
ister of finance, Jean Baptiste Colbert) enabled the manufacture of clear cast inside covers of snuffboxes, then took up indepen­
plate glass measuring more than 60 by 40 inches, allowing pastel portraits to be dent portrait miniatures (establishing the practice
of using ivory tablets as the support) and later
executed on the same scale as those in oil. The luxury implied by the costly glaz- pastels. She was admitted to membership in the
ing made pastels viable alternatives to easel paintings and well suited to display Accademia di San Luca, Rome, in 1705 and sub-
mitted a miniature representing a girl with a dove
the wealth and prestige of their owners, exemplified by the well-heeled young
as her reception piece. By 1709 she had painted a
couple in Charles Antoine Coypel’s double portrait (frontispiece, page 4). much-admired pastel self-portrait that later en-
tered the collection of Cosimo III de’ Medici and
The innovations that spurred the rising popularity of pastel were products of
is now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
the Enlightenment, an era that held great respect for the manufacturing trades Carriera’s clientele comprised princes of the
and crafts and had faith in the practical application of science and the arts to courts of Europe, including the aristocracy of
Venice and of Modena, and prominent German,
advance commerce and industry. The many newly established and reinvigorated French, and English connoisseurs, including
philosophical-scientific organizations in Europe and America, among them the many Grand Tourists. In 1720 – 21 she visited Paris.
While there she painted Louis XV as a child and
Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and the Académie des Sciences in was received into the French Académie Royale de
Paris (founded in 1648 and 1699, respectively), the American Philosophical Soci- Peinture et de Sculpture. In 1723 she was invited to
work at the ducal court of Modena and in 1730, at
ety in Philadelphia (1743), and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, the imperial court in Vienna. Friedrich August II
Manufacture and Commerce in London (1754), urged craftsmen and inventors of Saxony and Poland formed the most important
collection of her work, part of which may still
to revive neglected practices, abandon secretive ones, and improve their products be seen at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in
for the public good. The societies also provided channels for the dissemination of Dresden. As a miniaturist and as a pastelist, Car-
riera developed techniques that brought these art
the results of those efforts. In the spirit of fostering progress and the commercial forms to new heights, and she was acclaimed by
advantages resulting from it, makers of crayons, paper, and fixatives experimented her contemporaries. Her work is characterized
by technical fluency, sensitivity to expression, and
with increasingly softer pastels, more tenacious supports, and invisible, nondark-
lucid handling of the details of adornment.
ening coatings. To stimulate innovation, premiums were offered for “useful” The pastel Young Woman with Pearl Earrings
has only recently come to light. It shows a woman
products that would be tested by committees of artists or other qualified review-
with fair skin and lightly powdered ash-blond hair
ers. Practical information poured forth as well from encyclopedias, dictionaries, wearing pearl earrings and a corsage. All that is
journals, and manuals on the artisanal aspects of pastel. Robert Dossie’s Hand- visible of her costume is delicate gold-embroidered
gauze fabric and white and rose-colored draperies,
maid to the Arts (1758), John Russell’s Elements of Painting with Crayons (1772), which makes it difficult to assess her social status.
and P. R. de Chaperon’s Traité de la peinture au pastel, du secret d’en composer les The absence of invitation in her glance indicates
that she probably was not a professional model,
crayons & des moyens de le fixer (Treaty on Painting with Pastel, the Secret of as Rosalba’s models tend to look more alluring.
Making Crayons, and the Methods for Fixing Them; 1788), for example, nur- The work could be a portrait, or it could also be
a so-called disguised portrait, commissioned by
tured and reflected the widespread enthusiasm for the medium and inspired the the sitter or someone in her circle and intended
many connoisseurs and amateurs who sat for portraits or took up crayons as a to be read as an allegory of either Flora or Spring.
While it has been suggested that the subject
pleasurable diversion. might be the artist’s sister and assistant, Giovanna
The appeal of pastel was also one of economics and convenience. For artists, Carriera (1675 – 1737), her resemblance to Rosalba’s
self-portraits is not compelling. What is remark-
crayon portraiture was a lucrative business that could compete in the same mar- able about the pastel is the description of the
ketplace as oil painting. As George Vertue, the engraver whose notebooks were delicate skin of the face and neck, achieved using

8
9
10
a limited range of pink tones and exemplifying
the possibilities afforded to the gifted artist by the
powdery medium. It may date to about 1720.
About the identity of the sitter for the Metro­
politan Museum’s portrait there is no question.
Gustavus Hamilton was born in 1710 and suc-
ceeded his grandfather in 1723 as 2nd Viscount
Boyne. The Boynes are an Irish family of Scottish
descent. Hamilton’s grandfather, also named Gus-
tavus, received a land grant in Ireland from Wil-
liam III of England for his military service there.
He was raised to the peerage of Ireland in 1715 and
created a viscount in 1717. The second Lord Boyne
was invested a member of the Privy Council of
Ireland in 1736 and sat as a Member of Parliament
for Newport, Isle of Wight, from 1736 until 1741.
He died unmarried in 1746.
Lord Boyne made his Grand Tour with Edward
Walpole, the second son of the wealthy and power­
ful Whig prime minister Sir Robert Walpole.
The two had arrived in Venice by January 20,
1730, and stayed on until March, participating in
the pleasures of the Carnival season. Afterward
they visited Florence, Rome, and Naples and
returned to Venice by September 1. Boyne then
toured the islands of the Mediterranean and trav-
eled in Spain. He is not recorded in England until
the following autumn.
Lord Boyne must have sat for Carriera in
Venice during the Carnival of either 1730 or 1731.
His costume—tricorne hat, lace veil, and mask,
worn outdoors with a black cloak, offering its
wearer the advantage of anonymity—is known to
Venetians as the bautta. There are three versions
of the portrait. One belonged to Boyne’s descen-
dants until 1957 (it is now in a private collection)
and so would theoretically have been the first. the basis for Horace Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762 – 7 1),
It is nearly identical to the Museum’s portrait, observed, for most practitioners pastels were “much easier in the execution than
which descended in the family of a close friend
of the sitter. The third version, recently acquired Oil colours,” as the c0sts were lower and the handling more rapid. It being cus-
by the Barber Institute of Arts, University of Bir- tomary to price portraits according to their dimensions, the larger formats made
mingham, England, belonged in relatively recent
times to the Walpoles but cannot be traced back possible by the new larger glazing allowed pastelists to charge higher fees than
to Edward or to either of his brothers, Robert, in the past, while for their patrons pastels remained less expensive than oils.
the eldest, or Horace, the writer and collector and
the youngest. The design of the third version is
Pastel required no drying, and there were thus no color shifts, no varnish, no
unchanged, but in it Boyne wears a brown bro- offensive fumes, and fewer sittings — all features valued by patrons. A portrait in
caded coat. All three pastels must have resulted
from the sittings for whichever was first, and all
pastel, “the most commodious type of painting” according to Roger de Piles,
were probably painted within a year. required relatively little preparation, no assistants, and few tools: a box of cray-
ons, paper, a drawing board, and stumps for blending. The work was readily
transportable and thus as easily accomplished in a painting room in a city or spa
town as in a sitter’s residence. Such practicalities made pastel versatile, and well
Rosalba Carriera
suited to studies like Labille-Guiard’s Madame Élisabeth de France or Wright’s A
4. Gustavus Hamilton (1710 – 1746), 2nd
Viscount Boyne, in Masquerade Costume, Boy Reading (nos.  27, 38), independent sketches like Vigée Le Brun’s Lady
ca. 1730  – 31 Ossulston or Prud’hon’s Nicolas Perchet (nos.  30, 31), highly finished works like
Pastel on blue paper, laid down on canvas; 22¼ x 167/8 in. Capet’s Jean Pierre Demetz or Cotes’s James Rivington Sr. (nos.  32, 36), or the
(56.5 x 42.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Purchase, George Delacorte Fund Gift, in memory replicas commonly made in this medium.
of George T. Delacorte Jr., and Gwynne Andrews,
Artists and their patrons also appreciated the distinctive optical properties of
Victor Wilbour Memorial, and Marquand Funds,
2002 (2002.22) paintings in dry color, their nonyellowing brilliance and the unmistakable bloom,
11
or fleur, that enlivens the complexion of the sitter. This effect, a characteristic of all Jean Étienne Liotard
(Swiss, Geneva 1702 – 1789 Geneva)
powders, is produced by the innumerable irregular particles of pastel, each of
5. Young Woman in Turkish Costume Playing
which reflects light diffusely. Described by Sir Isaac Newton in his widely read
the Tambourine, ca. 1740
Opticks of 1704 as far brighter than the light emitted from most any other surface,
Pastel, gouache, and red chalk on off-white laid paper,
scattered light confers on pastel an unmistakable matte, velvetlike quality, a unique, laid down on canvas; 24¼ x 18½ in. (61.6 x 47 cm).
Private collection
immediately recognizable sense of white light. The scintillating reflections from
pastel portraits, along with their glazing and gilt frames, harmonized with the Born in Geneva to French Protestant parents, Jean
flickering light reverberating from glass-paneled windows, mirrors, crystal chan- Étienne Liotard was first apprenticed there to
the portraitist, miniaturist, and enamelist Daniel
deliers, brass buttons, upholstery tacks, and the myriad other polished surfaces in Gardelle (1673 – 1753) and then worked in Paris
the newly fashionable small reception rooms in which they were hung. In his under the tutelage of the miniaturist and engraver
Jean Baptiste Massé (1687 – 1767). Setting off from
“Notes on Crayon Painting” (published in the European Magazine in February Italy in 1738 with Sir William Ponsonby’s Grand
1797, twenty-seven years after his death), Francis Cotes, the most renowned British Tour party, Liotard spent four years in Constan-
tinople, painting ambassadors, merchants, and
pastelist of the mid-eighteenth century, described crayon pictures as “superlatively slaves. He later traveled across Europe, working
beautiful, and decorative in a very high degree in apartments that are not too large; in Paris, London, Vienna, Venice, and Amster-
dam as a portraitist, miniaturist, and painter of
for, having their surface dry, they partake in appearance of the effect of Fresco, and
genre scenes. He painted members of the British
by candle light are luminous and beautiful beyond all other pictures.” and French royal families and developed a close
relationship of patronage with the empress Marie
The exquisite luminosity of pastel is alluring, but it is also vexing, for the pow-
Thérèse of Austria. In 1781, at the age of seventy-
dery nature and fragility of the medium dictate the unique method by which it is nine, he published his theory of painting, and he
fabricated and the specific techniques for its application and protection. Unlike continued to work until his death eight years later.
Liotard was a prolific pastelist, and the vast
oils, crayons cannot be blended on a palette or on a support to produce a new tone, majority of his oeuvre was in that medium. He was
lest they become compressed and lose their optical and chromatic brilliance. And also an accomplished draftsman. Although this
com­position has no known precedent, 89 of
because pastel is both powdery and opaque, it cannot be applied in glazes to mod- Liotard’s 200 extant drawings are from the Turkish
ify the hues. Thus, to achieve maximum purity of tone in the final composition, period, and many of those were later worked up
into highly colorful genre scenes. This image of a
each color must be available before the painting process begins (a distinctive fea- girl playing a deff, or tambourine, which exists
ture of the medium), hence the artists’ need to work with innumerable crayons. in two versions (the other is an oil painting in the
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva), epitomizes
Making the preformed colors that comprised the pastelist’s palette was a Liotard’s attention to naturalistic detail. The colors
laborious and often secretive process, seeming to verge on alchemy. Unlike red, of the pastel radiate from the paper. The girl is
richly attired in a blue and gold caftan, loose striped
white, or black chalks, natural materials that are mined from the earth, cut into trousers, a floral head scarf, and a wide belt draped
sticks, and used without alteration, pastel is a fabricated medium. It is composed in red fabric. She wears a necklace of gold coins
and three jeweled rings, and the tips of her fingers
of three ingredients: colored pigment, a white mineral or pigment (called the
are dyed with henna. A cushion and a smoking
filler or base), and a binder. In the eighteenth century, to create crayons of a uni- pipe lean against the plain wall behind her, which
emphasizes the color and vibrancy of her costume.
form and soft consistency the pigment and filler had to be levigated to remove
While he was in Constantinople Liotard grew
gritty particles, reduced to a fine powder, combined with a binder, ground to a his beard, donned Turkish clothes, and fashioned
paste with a muller in water or spirits of wine, tempered with a knife, drained on himself “the Turkish painter,” creating an exotic
reputation that garnered him much popularity
a chalk stone or set on a glass plate to maintain the correct amount of moisture, during his later years. When he died a number of
rolled into cylindrical sticks, and dried. That each component had particular colorful “Turkish” costumes were found among
his belongings, and letters from his children sug-
properties that needed to be accommodated by trial and error and that each gest that these were for both his own use and
color had to be created in a separate operation made the process even more his sitters’. Whether or not this costume came
from Liotard’s studio cupboard, it is very similar
demanding. To produce painterly strokes with excellent covering power, the ideal to others in his works, suggesting that he reused
crayon (as prescribed by artists’ handbooks) was texturally homogeneous, opaque, or reimagined certain garments throughout his
career. Indeed, this composition might belong
and soft; it was solid when grasped between the fingers; and it spent freely when either to Liotard’s years in Constantinople or to
stroked across the support. the late 1740s and 1750s, when, with the increasing
fame of his Turkish subjects, he began to paint
Of the approximately sixty-five pigments available in the eighteenth cen- some of his European sitters, among them the
tury, few were used to manufacture the hundreds of different-colored crayons empress Marie Thérèse, in Ottoman dress.

12
13
14
Anton Raphael Mengs
(German, Aussig 1728 – 1779 Rome)

6. Pleasure, ca. 1754
Pastel on paper, laid down on canvas, oval; 243/8 x 19¼ in.
(61.9 x 48.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Victor Wilbour Memorial, The Alfred N. Punnett
Endowment, and Marquand Funds, 2005 (2005.231)

Anton Raphael Mengs, born in Bohemia (in

what is now the Czech Republic), spent his
childhood in Dresden, where his father, Ismael
Mengs (1688 – 1764), was court painter to Friedrich
August II of Saxony. The aptly named youth was
schooled principally in Rome, arriving in 1740 for
a stay of four years, returning from 1746 through
1749, and from 1751 living there for much of the
balance of his life. Although he was well known
to his contemporaries as both a practitioner and a
theorist of Neoclassicism, since his death Mengs
has been less admired as a history painter, and it
could perhaps be argued that he was too much
influenced by Raphael. Among his most famous
works are the frescoed ceiling depicting Parnassus
in the ballroom of Cardinal Alessandro Albani’s
villa in Rome, completed in 1761, and the fresco
decorations he undertook shortly thereafter for
Carlos III in the Palacio Real in Madrid.
Mengs was a gifted portraitist, and for a short
time after his return to Dresden in 1744 he had
a successful practice in pastel portraiture. In this
he was inspired by Rosalba Carriera (see nos. 3, 4),
whose work was well represented in the Dresden
collections. Mengs’s pastel portraits are blond in
tone and smoothly modeled, the strokes of the
crayon disguised as in a highly finished oil paint-
ing. While the characterizations are searching,
they are closely calibrated to the sitters’ rank, and
the costumes are sharply detailed.
The Metropolitan’s pastel, which likely dates
to the mid-1750s, is self-evidently not a portrait
but was nevertheless studied from a model and
then perfected in accordance with what Mengs
understood to be the classical standard. Pretty and
androgynous, this allegorical figure of Pleasure
lies midway between the Rococo and the high-
minded historicism of nascent Neoclassicism. The
modeling is delicate and softly blended. With its contained in the pastel box. One contemporary manual directed to the amateur
anatomical perfection Mengs must have intended
the figure to be reminiscent of both Raphael and lists fourteen pigments, another eleven, although commercial crayon makers
the antique. He may have conceived of Pleasure as must have used more. As Chaperon put it in his Traité de la peinture au pastel,
part of a group of three that also included Truth
(Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and Innocence “opulence in pastel does not consist of possessing many pigments, but using
(of which only copies are known). For these per- those one has advantageously. It is rich with very little.” At a time when theories
sonifications he relied on descriptions in Cesare
Ripa’s much-reprinted iconographical encyclo-
on color and optical mixing abounded, this practical application of science would
pedia, the Iconologia, which directs that Pleasure have been well received by the makers of crayons, but for artists a vast array of
should be shown as a handsome, smiling youth of
sixteen dressed in green, with a garland of roses
crayons was critical to producing the gradations from dark to light necessary for
on his head and much adorned. the seamlessly modeled, lifelike flesh tones and fabrics demanded by prevailing
taste. These many colors were created from single pigments, mixtures of pig-
ments (vermillion, red lead, and king’s yellow, for example, could be compounded
to make a bright orange), and tints, or gradations made from combinations of
15
 John Singleton Copley
(American, Boston 1738 – 1815 London)

7. Mrs. Edward Green (Mary Storer,

1736 – after 1791), 1765
Pastel on paper, laid down on canvas; 23 x 17½ in.
(58.4 x 44.5 cm). Signed and dated below center left:
John S. Copley  / fec t 1765. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Charles B. Curtis Fund, 1908 (08.1b)

John Singleton Copley was born in 1738 in Bos-

ton, to which his Irish parents had emigrated. His
father died when he was a boy and his stepfather,
Peter Pelham, who had been an engraver in
London, taught him to scrape mezzotints and
study prints, which with manuals of instruction
were the principal sources of information about
European art available to a self-taught painter
in the American colonies. In 1754 Copley made
a copy in oils (now in a private collection) of
Nicholas Tardieu’s engraving after The Forge of
Vulcan by Charles Antoine Coypel (see nos. 9,
10). He may have begun to use pastel crayons as
early as 1758, having learned about them from
Pelham or perhaps from local painter and color-
man John Smibert. By the age of twenty, the
quick and intuitive Copley had proven himself
to be a high-style, ambitious portraitist working
in an exactingly realistic manner that suited his
Boston clientele.
In 1762 Copley wrote to Jean Étienne Liotard
(see no. 5) to ask him for a box of the best pastels
that could be had. But his interest in the medium
lasted only a few years. He painted mostly in oils,
and in 1765 he sent an oil portrait to London for
the Society of Artists exhibition, where it was
admired by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin
West. In 1774 Copley left Boston for Europe,
intending to become a history painter. Later he
settled with his family in London and joined the

colored powders and white filler, added (as Russell instructed in Elements of
Painting with Crayons) in increments of up to 20 parts filler to 1 part color. The
darkest colors (in the hat in Carriera’s portrait of Gustavus Hamilton, for in-
stance, or the background in La Tour’s of Jean Charles Garnier d’Isle; see nos. 4,
17), made from lampblack, Prussian blue, indigo, or other deep pigments, incor-
porated only a small proportion of filler, as they required the greatest depth of
tone to counteract the light reflected from their surface. Light hues (the pinks
and blues of Grueze’s Baptiste aîné or the pearl grays and whites of the apparel
in Russell’s Mrs. William Man Godschall; see nos. 25, 42) were compounded with
greater proportions of filler. And middle tones (Ebenezer Storer’s ruddy com-
plexion or the nuanced blues in Madame Royer’s dress; see nos. 8, 11) were simi-
larly adjusted with proportional admixtures of white.
Fillers served other important functions, providing opacity to the colors, tex-
ture to render the pigments soft and workable, and body to make the crayons

16
John Singleton Copley
8. Ebenezer Storer Jr. (1729 – 1807), ca. 1768
Pastel on paper, laid down on canvas; 231/8 x 171/8 in.
(58.7 x 43.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and Lila Acheson
Wallace Gift, 2008 (2008.249.2)

Royal Academy. When he exhibited Watson and

the Shark (National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C.) there in 1778, he set the course for the bal-
ance of his life. He died in London in 1815.
The Storers of Boston were among those
most eager for Copley’s pastels; the Metropolitan
Museum owns portraits of Ebenezer and Mary
Storer, their daughter, Mary Storer Green, their
son, Ebenezer Storer Jr., and their daughter-in-
law, Elizabeth. Mary Storer Green was apparently
the first member of her extended family to sit for
Copley, in 1765. Her costume and hair, dressed
tightly with artificial flowers and pearls, could
equally have been worn by a sitter for a por-
trait by Joshua Reynolds; only the delicate lace
fastened over the bodice differs slightly from the
English fashion. The tight collar of pearls over-
emphasizes her long neck, and the heavy shadow
on the side of her face turned from the light is
unflattering, but overall Copley achieved a good
effect. His portrait of Mary’s brother, the sharp-
eyed merchant Ebenezer Storer Jr., may date a year
or two later. Storer wears an extravagantly shaped
turban on his freshly shaven head and a splendid
gown, or banyan, of tobacco-colored figured dam-
ask, items of dress that appear elsewhere in Cop-
ley’s oeuvre and may therefore have been among
his studio properties. Storer’s face is vital and life-
like, and it could be argued that Copley responded
more acutely to the male than to the female sitter.

solid, serviceable tools. This component was ultimately determined by the prop-
erties of the pigment, such as its cohesiveness or brittleness. White chalk of vari-
ous types was often used, but other fillers were employed as well, among them
gypsum, starch, plaster of paris, and tobacco-pipe clay. Aesthetic preferences also
at times influenced the choice of filler. For example, tobacco-pipe clay had
declined in use by the 1760s because it produced crayons that were too hard and
thus did not spread freely. It was replaced by kaolin, a soft clay. The introduction
of kaolin as a pastel filler underscores the link between commerce and art, for its
use corresponded with the discovery of European deposits of the mineral, a key
ingredient for imitating Chinese porcelain, then a much-coveted luxury.
Whereas the powdered mixture of filler and pigment accounted for pastel’s
distinctive optical properties, binders made from a vast array of weak adhesives
both common and esoteric (gums tragacanth and arabic, decoctions of ale wort,
skim milk, oatmeal whey, barley, and gypsum, among others) enabled the dry

17
 Charles Antoine Coypel
(French, Paris 1694 – 1752 Paris)

9. Medea, ca. 1714
Pastel on paper, 115/8 x 81/8 in. (29.4 x 20.6 cm). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick
Fund, 1953 (1974.25)

Charles Antoine Coypel was born in Paris in

1694, the son of Antoine Coypel (1661 – 1722),
professor at the Académie Royale de Peinture et
de Sculpture. His father later succeeded as direc-
tor of the Académie and first painter to the king,
and Charles would follow in his footsteps. In 1705
the boy was awarded a prize for a drawing at the
school of the Académie. Ten years later he was
simultaneously received and accepted as an acade-
mician at a session over which his father presided.
The younger Coypel’s first major commission was
for tapestry cartoons depicting scenes from Don
Quixote that he prepared for the Manufacture des
Gobelins beginning in 1716. Typically for Coypel,
they are theatrical in their gestural language and
mise-en-scène. In the same period Coypel wrote
many sketches for plays. These were submitted
to the Théâtre Italien in Paris, but only one was
staged there, in 1717: it was titled Arlequin dans l’île
de Ceylan (Harlequin on the Island of Ceylon).
The sketch was performed again for Louis XV in
1719, and in 1721 the king twice acted as the god
of love in a comedy-ballet Coypel had authored.
Despite additional presentations of his theatrical
work at court in the later 1720s, however, Coypel
was not highly regarded for his plays, which was a
source of bitter disappointment.
Because history painting was regarded as the
noblest of the genres and first in the hierarchy of
subjects, it was incumbent upon an eighteenth-
century academic artist to strive for success as a
history painter. As his reception piece for the
ingredients to be formed into crayons. The choice of binder depended on the Académie in 1715 Coypel thus chose Jason and
Medea (Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin), depicting
properties of the other components; the goal was to create crayons that were tex-
on a canvas more than six feet high the triumph
turally balanced between strength and softness. Binders were used sparingly, for of the vengeful sorceress. Abandoned by Jason,
Medea has killed their children and Jason’s new
more than a scant amount would make a crayon too cohesive and impair both its
wife. Towering above the scene in a chariot drawn
tendency to powder when stroked and its light-reflecting capacity. The minimal by a dragon, she illuminates the carnage with a
presence of a gradually darkening medium, and the absence of a surface varnish, firebrand and brandishes the dagger with which
she has murdered the children, whose bodies lie in
ensured the lasting freshness of the colors, one of the prized features of pastel. the foreground. Coypel had already settled on the
Pastelists Francis Cotes, John Russell, and Anton Raphael Mengs made final design when he prepared this compelling
pastel drawing of the head of the principal figure:
their own crayons, but most practitioners heeded the experts’ advice that they a furious, pallid female with clenched brows and
purchase them, given the complexities of the process and the multiple hues popping eyes set in reddened wells. The angle of
the model’s jaw and the indications of the contours
required. Newspapers, trade cards, and artists’ manuals record at least sixty pastel of her shoulders match those of the figure in the
artisans and merchants active in Europe in the eighteenth century. Many finished picture. The study of how the emotions
find expression on the human face was a princi-
achieved recognition through these means alone; others attracted customers by pal concern for artists who, like Coypel, had
submitting their crayons to the art academy of their city. The French Académie been influenced by Charles Le Brun’s Méthode
pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (Method for
Royale issued awards in 1764 to the widow Pellechet for her oil pastels, which Learning How to Draw the Passions; 1698). Such
were judged excellent by four pastelists, including La Tour and the scientifically studies, by their nature incomplete, are rare in the

18
Charles Antoine Coypel
10.  A Nobleman as
Daphnis, ca. 1738
Pastel on paper, 32 x 253/8 in.
(81.2 x 64.5 cm). The Horvitz
Collection, Boston

pastel medium, which Coypel used with finesse as Daphnis, the beautiful shepherd boy of antiq- sound that was much favored by the upper classes
well as passion. uity, evokes music, poetry, and the elegant plea- in eighteenth-century France. The actor-musician
Coypel’s first signed and dated portraits, from sures of the pastoral life. A Nobleman as Daphnis can be identified as an aristocrat by the red heels
1717, are vivid characterizations in pastel of Nicolas is unusual, not least because the use of pastel is of his shoes and by the presence on a reproduc-
Charles Silvestre (1699 – 1767) and his wife, both of mostly confined to portraiture. Here, in accor- tive print after this pastel of an as yet unidentified
whom were drawing teachers to members of the dance with the conventions of the time, Daphnis noble coat of arms. Though the subject’s name
royal family at Versailles. In addition to histori- is dressed in contemporary costume, but the cos- has escaped discovery, the work may be dated to
cal and religious subjects in the grand manner, tume is of the theater rather than the court. The about 1738 by its association with a portrait of
he painted genre scenes, children in the guise short coat, satchel, and staff or crook are also attri- Gaspard de Gueidan (magistrate, advocate general,
of adults, and caricatures, some sharply satirical. butes of a pilgrim. The rosettes the sitter wears, and president of the local parliament in Aix-en-
His portraits of important sitters and also other as well as the slashed breeches and coat sleeves, Provence), in a similar pose and with a musette
works of a more popular nature were engraved. would have been suited to a play or opera-ballet. (Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence), that Hyacinthe
Destined for success from an early age, Coypel was Daphnis plays the musette, a lavishly embellished Rigaud painted that year.
appointed premier peintre du roi in 1747. eighteenth-century bagpipe with a soft nasal

19
inclined Jean Jacques Bachelier; in 1772 to M. de Saint-Michel, painter to the Jean Marc Nattier
(French, Paris 1685 – 1766 Paris)
king of Sardinia, for his superior pastels of uniform softness; and in 1780 to Sieur
11. Madame Joseph Nicolas Pancrace Royer
Nadaux for his exceptional crayons. To promote the commerce of color the Royal
(Louise Geneviève Le Blond), ca. 1750
Society of London in 1767 offered a “bounty” of 10 guineas for a new method of
Pastel on paper, two sheets joined, laid down on canvas;
preparing crayons and in 1773 rewarded a member of a noted family of pastel 31¾ x 25¼ in. (80.6 x 64.1 cm). Private collection

makers for his improved yet low-priced crayons.

Jean Marc Nattier was born in Paris in 1685, the
Crayons could be purchased directly from fabricators, such as the renowned younger of two sons of Marc Nattier (1642 – 1705),
Stoupan of Lausanne (whose pastels set the standard of excellence), Macle of a portraitist. Both boys were admitted to the
school of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de
Paris, and Charles Sandys of London, or through importers like the colormen Sculpture. By 1704 their father had contracted
John James Bonhote of Britain and Pfannenschmid of Hanover. The pastels for the preparation of reproductive engravings
after Rubens’s famous paintings of the Marie de’
could be procured individually or in sets: Boursin in France advertised boxes Médicis series in the French royal collection, for
of 130 colors; Daniel Caffé in Dresden offered as many as 300. Those who had which they prepared the drawings. In 1717 Nattier
painted the emperor of Russia, Peter the Great
no access to such shops or dealers found other ways to acquire them. On Sep- (State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg),
tember 30, 1762, the young John Singleton Copley wrote from Boston to Jean and in 1718 he was received into the Académie
as a history painter. In the 1730s his portraits of
Étienne Liotard in Geneva asking him to send “one sett of Crayons of the very
women, especially those in mythological or alle-
best kind such as You can recommend [for] liveliness of colour and Justness of gorical guise and often in a palette of blue and
white, became his most important and popular
tints.” The virtuoso painter Arthur Pond sold “French crayons” to his two female
productions. Marie Leszczyńska, queen consort
pupils. Rosalba Carriera had friends in Rome, Flanders, and Paris purchase flesh of Louis XV, commissioned a portrait of herself in
tones for her. For many pastelists, Charles Antoine Coypel among them, procur- 1748, and the king ordered paintings of their three
youngest daughters, Mesdames Victoire, Sophie,
ing pastels in distinctive hues from various fabricators was commonplace. and Louise, in court dress (all four portraits are in
Aside from the actual business of fabricating crayons were the critical stan- the Musée National du Château de Versailles). By
the 1750s interest in Nattier’s work had begun to
dards to which these enterprises, like the makers of oils, watercolors, and other decline, however, and he died in poverty.
artists’ colors, were held. The Royal Society of London asserted that it was “rare Pastels by Nattier are rare, and only in 1746 and
1748 did he show pastel portraits at the Académie
to find a set of such crayons as may be called good” because those readily available Royale. He was perhaps inspired by Joseph Vivien
were faulty, their poor quality being due to the “ignorance, or sordidness of deal- (1657 – 1734), a gifted artist of the previous genera-
tion. This presumed portrait of Louise Royer in
ers.” In 1773 the society offered a premium to the colorman or manufactory who evening dress, leaning on a ledge, came to light
could produce crayons that would “prevent the frequent and great mortifications, in 1908 as a pendant to a pastel of the same size
(its present location is unknown) representing her
which the most eminent artists of the present time have undergone in seeing the husband, the composer and harpsichordist Joseph
beauty of their works quickly fade; and of suffering the reproaches and reflections Nicolas Pancrace Royer (ca. 1700/1705 – 1755). Both
portraits must date to the late 1740s and show
of those who have purchased them.” Similar complaints were voiced in France.
the artist working in his most naturalistic vein.
La Tour’s crayon maker, one Charmeton, was denounced as “disreputable and The sitter’s extravagant costume is detailed with
care: a dress trimmed with pearls and a corsage of
profit-hungry,” and Chaperon opined in his Traité that crayons were generally
artificial flowers, a cape, and a ribbon around her
coarse and gritty and not well prepared: “Color merchants devise many mysteries neck, all the trim elaborately ruched, and a ribbon
about their pastels but not even two or three in Paris know how to make them, and feather in her curled, powdered hair. In one
hand Madame Royer holds a fan and in the other
relying instead on expedient methods and impure substances.” a mask called a loup, which she will don in the
The other essential element in the production of a pastel portrait was the sup- street. The seams of the glove on her right hand
have been opened to reveal her polished nails. She
port. In the eighteenth century pastels were executed on paper, vellum, canvas, is not beautiful, but her quizzical, knowing expres-
and even copper, but paper, handmade and easily obtained from stationers, was by sion commands attention.
Little is known about this stylish woman
far the most widespread support. Like easel paintings, finished pastels were invari- except that she was born Louise Geneviève Le
ably mounted on a wood framework. To improve their durability, works on paper Blond and that she married Royer sometime after
1725 and survived him. In 1734 Royer was appointed
were pasted to fine canvas that had been previously tacked to a strainer, an immo- a music teacher to the daughters of Louis XV, and
bile or keyless stretcher. (Coypel’s double portrait [page 4], atypically for a pastel, in 1746 he published a book of harpsichord music
he dedicated to them. He appears in his less for-
is affixed to one of the earliest known examples of a keyed stretcher, which can be mal portrait with the score of his famous opera-
expanded or tightened to create uniform tension in the support.) Propped on an ballet Zaïde, reine de Grenade (1739).

20
21
 Jean Siméon Chardin
(French, Paris 1699 – 1779 Paris)

12. Head of an Old Man, 1771

Pastel on blue paper, laid down on canvas; 17 5/8 x
145/8 in. (44.9 x 37 cm). Signed and dated in brown
pastel at lower right: chardin  / 1771; at upper right:
C 1771 Char. The Horvitz Collection, Boston

Jean Siméon Chardin, born in Paris in 1699,

trained with the history painter Pierre Jacques
Cazes (1676 – 1754) and in 1728 was received into
the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture,
presenting two still lifes that were admired by the
academicians. One is the famous painting of a ray
fish and the other a more traditional canvas rep-
resenting a buffet (both in the Musée du Louvre,
Paris). In the 1730s Chardin began to paint genre
scenes, and these he exhibited with success at the
Salon when it reopened in 1737. His bourgeois
interiors and scenes of children playing were
inspired in part by Dutch cabinet pictures (the
Metro­politan Museum’s Soap Bubbles of about 1735
is a good example). Chardin was elected treasurer
of the Académie in 1755, oversaw the hanging
of the Salon exhibitions, and was very much an
establishment figure even though he worked in
what were then considered to be the least impor-
tant categories of painting, still life and genre.
By 1770 the aging artist could no longer use
oils because the lead-based materials the pig-
ments contained were contributing to his increas-
ing blindness. Having taken up the medium for
the first time at the age of seventy, he exhibited
pastel studies described in the exhibition lists
as “expressive heads” at the Salons of 1771, 1773,
1775, 1777, and 1779 (the year of his death). Two,
or perhaps three, of those are likely to have been
self-portraits, and one may have been a portrait
of his second wife, all of which are in the Musée
du Louvre, Paris. Pastel studies of two children
easel, this format provided a resilient surface on which to work. As evidenced in that were on the art market in 2003 are dated 1777
and were exhibited the same year. Another of an
their self-portraits, many painters in pastel considered the bare, mounted sheet
old woman in a black veil copied from a painting
ready to receive the marks of the crayon the proud symbol of their practice. by or after Rembrandt is dated 1776; it belongs to
Textural properties, strength, and color were of great importance in choosing the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon. This lifesize
Head of an Old Man from the Horvitz Collection,
paper for pastel. Throughout the eighteenth century paper was made for the Boston, is signed and dated 1771 and was prob-
general purposes of printing, writing, or wrapping, but not for artists’ needs. The ably exhibited that year. It is Chardin’s earliest
known work in what was for him a new medium.
papers most commonly used for crayon painting, eventually referred to as “wrap- The critics received Chardin’s contributions to the
pers,” were colored, thick, and robust. Most popular with pastelists was blue 1771 Salon with high praise, finding in them the
technical assurance, boldness, and truth to nature
paper processed from indigo-dyed rags in shades from drab to brilliant, though for which the old artist was famous. Although at
papers in muted grays, whited browns, buffs, and off-whites were also employed. first glance the palette is neutral, close observation
reveals a subtle and varied coloration. Chardin
(Paper in richly saturated hues was not produced until the early nineteenth cen- endowed his contemplative model with monu-
tury.) Although pastels were customarily executed on colored paper, this was mentality, sobriety, and wisdom. This work bears
comparison with a number of study heads in pastel
rarely because of aesthetic considerations, as the hue was not intended to be vis- that Benedetto Luti painted in Rome some fifty
ible in the final composition. Unlike the paper left in reserve for the middle tone years earlier.
in chalk drawings, the support of a pastel, like a painting’s canvas, was expected to
be obscured by the medium’s opacity and by its coverage across the entire surface.
22
François Boucher
(French, Paris 1703 – 1770 Paris)

13. Jean  Claude Gaspard de Sireuil (died 1781),

1761
Pastel and red chalk on paper, 12½ x 91/8 in. (31.6 x
23.2 cm). Inscribed on backing: Boucher Delineavit Et
donavit 1761. Private collection

Born in Paris in humble circumstances, François

Boucher came to the attention of the painter
François Lemoyne (1688 – 1737) at an early age
and won first prize in the 1723 competition of the
Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. He
should have been guaranteed a place at the French
Academy in Rome, but none was available, so he
supported himself in the print trade and then
traveled to Italy in 1728. Boucher’s star rose late
but meteorically. Admitted a candidate of the
Paris Académie in 1731, he was received in 1734
and appointed full professor in 1737. With the
reopening of the Salon in 1737 he began to exhibit
there annually with great success. From 1750 he
worked for Madame de Pompadour, mistress of
Louis XV, and at his death in 1770 he was premier
peintre du roi. Boucher preferred pastoral subjects
but commanded the full range of genres, and his
painterly style in oils was matched by his techni-
cal brilliance both as a draftsman in a range of
media and as a printmaker. Pastels are a rarity in
his enormous oeuvre. Fine examples belong to the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and
the Art Institute of Chicago.
According to an inscription on the reverse of
the frame, this portrait by Boucher represents
Jean Claude Gaspard de Sireuil, écuier premier, or
first equerry (an officer of a princely or noble fam-
ily charged with overseeing the horses). A further
inscription in Latin on the back of the mount
states that Boucher drew and presented the pastel
For the crayon painter, colored paper was a working tool, both a chromatic point
to Sireuil in 1761. Very little else is known of the
sitter’s life. A pastel of him by Boucher, presum- from which the hues would be developed to their lightest and darkest tones and
ably this one, is listed in the valuation of Sireuil’s a foil that served to enhance their brilliance and moderate their rawness.
effects filed after his death in Paris in 1781. And
four other pastels, fifteen paintings, and more than It is usually not possible to discern the color of the support of an eighteenth-
two hundred drawings by Boucher were included century pastel. The brilliant blue paper of Cotes’s Lieutenant-Colonel the Honor-
in the catalogue of his estate sale, the introduction
to which describes Sireuil as a friend and admirer able Edmund Craggs Nugent and Wright’s Study Head of a Woman (nos. 35, 37),
of the artist, a constant visitor to his studio, and a for example, cannot be detected without viewing the verso. Few artists incorpo-
passionate collector of his work.
Boucher applied even pressure to the crayons rated this chromatic element into the final effect of their work, or did so in the
and worked the sheet up fully, with finish and way that Rosalba Carriera used minute reserves of blue paper to suggest space
detail rather than with the gestural fluidity associ-
ated with his drawing style. “behind” Viscount Boyne’s lace veil (see no. 4). Rather than a trick to deceive
the eye, revealing the reserve between strokes was more often unintended or
spontaneous, producing chromatic accents such as the small passages in Car-
riera’s Young Woman with Pearl Earrings (no. 3) that contrast with her otherwise
meticulous handling, the traces of blue paper that harmonize with the color-
ation of Prud’hon’s Nicolas Perchet (no.  31), the exposed touches of the beige
support that enliven the mouth in Perronneau’s Olivier Journu (no. 21), and the
slivers of white paper that evoke a sense of luminosity in Gardner’s Lady
23
Jean Baptiste Claude Richard, Jean Baptiste Claude Richard was born in Paris later he bought a benefice, becoming in 1758 abbé
Abbé de Saint-Non in 1727. He was a younger son, although not with- commendataire of the abbey of Pothières, near
(French, Paris 1727 – 1791 Paris) out financial resources. His father, Jean Pierre Châtillon-sur-Seine, Burgundy, from which he
Richard, had been receveur générale des finances received a generous stipend. Saint-Non spent
14. Two Sisters, 1770 for Tours and owned property in Paris and to the balance of his life in comfort, a congenial
Pastel on paper, two sheets joined, laid down on canvas; the west of the city at Saint-Non (modern Saint- figure in Paris society, an artist, traveler, writer,
315/8 x 25 in. (80.3 x 63.5 cm). Signed and dated at left: Nom) and La Bretèche. In 1748, the year after his and amateur of the arts. He died in 1791, having
SaintNon  / 1770. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, father’s death, he was graduated in theology from previously renounced half of his income from
Gift of Daniel Wildenstein, 1977 (1977.383) the Sorbonne and took minor religious orders; Pothières in the cause of the French Revolution.

24
 Williams-Wynn (no. 40). According to the Goncourt brothers, writing a century
later, La Tour represented another, perhaps extreme point of view regarding
colored supports that seems not to have been shared by many others. Because
he adamantly disliked the pervasive cast of blue paper he coated it with a wash
of yellow ocher diluted with water and egg yolk. Presumably this neutralized
the tone and obviated the need for a thick layer of pastel to hide the color.
Under magnification, evidence of a similar type of coating can be seen in his
portrait of Garnier d’Isle (no. 17).
Depending on their pulp furnish, or content, most often blends of low-grade
linen and hemp rope, papers used for pastels in the eighteenth century varied in
quality, but they were typically thick and strong in order to withstand the treat-
ment necessary to produce a nap that would hold the powder. Until 1756, when
wove paper was introduced, all paper was formed on molds bearing a grid of
laid and chain lines. To minimize these shadow-producing marks that projected
through the pastel layer and hence across the face of the sitter, pastelists usu-
ally modified the surface of the sheets. Some ready-to-use supports, such as silk
The abbé was a prolific printmaker, specializing in crayon paper (the first artists’ specialty paper, promoted by the Royal Society to
aquatint; he is recorded also as a painter, drafts-
man, and pastelist, but few works by him in any encourage competition with higher-grade products from continental mills) were
of these media have been identified. commercially available, but most sheets were specially prepared by the artists
Saint-Non is chiefly remembered for the jour-
nal of his visit to Italy in 1759 – 61, for his associa- themselves. This could entail simply leveling knots in the paper with a pen-
tion with the painters Hubert Robert and Jean knife, sanding the surface with pumice, or pouring boiling water over the paper
Honoré Fragonard, and for his support of the
publication of a great eighteenth-century French to remove the sizing and bring up the fibers. These procedures in their many
illustrated book, Voyage pittoresque, ou description variations had an aesthetic impact on the portrait. The most heavily manipu-
des royaumes de Naples et de Sicilie (1781 – 86). The
abbé met Fragonard in Rome, and together they lated papers and papers retaining the mold marks are usually associated with
traveled through the major cities of northern Italy, relatively open, rapid handling, whereas the most uniformly smooth prepared
returning to France together in 1761. He owned
several important paintings and many drawings
surfaces underlie highly finished compositions. For example, for Olivier Journu
by Fragonard, and in 1769 sat for one of Frago- (no.  21) Perronneau did not modify the paper, and the mold marks visible in
nard’s most beautiful figures de fantaisie, or fantasy
portraits (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
the sitter’s face produce an effect that breaks the stroke, enhances the sense of
Saint-Non was basically a highly skilled copy- rapid draftsmanship, and complements the fragmented bold coloring of the skin
ist. Two Sisters, his best work in pastel, reproduces
tones. Carriera obscured these marks in Viscount Boyne’s likeness (no. 4) but left
an oil painting by Fragonard of the same title
(Metropolitan Museum) as it looked before it them in the background, as did Wright in his female portrait (no. 37), an expedi-
was cut down to about half its original size. The
ent technique that also emphasized the flawless texture of the sitter’s complex-
pastel is signed and dated 1770, which supplies
supporting evidence for the approximate date of ion. Exceptionally, the highly finished expanse of pastel in the face in La Tour’s
the painting. The identity of the two children is Jean Charles Garnier d’Isle (no. 17) is rendered on an area of projecting fibers that
not known, and the work could be read either as
a double portrait or as a genre scene. Typically, the resulted from his practice of repeatedly scraping down and reworking the image.
girls are dressed as adults, in contemporary cos- For artists working in a highly sculptural manner, wire marks and knots
tumes. The younger child rides a wheeled horse,
and below is a Polichinelle doll, a masked clown impaired the illusion of reality: Mengs obliterated them in his meticulous
in a bicorne hat. Saint-Non’s children are prettier Pleasure (no. 6), as did Nattier in his portrait of Madame Royer and Hamilton in
and more conventional in appearance than Frago-
nard’s. The arrangement of the folds of the older his cameolike classicizing portrait of Canova (nos. 11, 34), by combining an even-
girl’s skirt differs in the pastel, and Saint-Non surfaced sheet with a thick layer of pastel. In Young Woman in Turkish Costume
eschewed the brilliant yellow that Fragonard used
for the younger girl’s dress. The pastel is rare and
Playing the Tambourine (n0. 5) Liotard used paper coated with gum size and fine
has enormous charm. A close look at the extended sifted marble dust to achieve the same illusion he masterfully conveyed in the
left arm of the older sister and the left hand of the
younger, however, reveals the limits of its author’s
pastels he rendered on strikingly smooth parchment. Similar preparations made
abilities as a draftsman. from smalt (blue powdered glass derived from cobalt) were also promoted for

25
26
Maurice Quentin de La Tour coating supports for pastel. The introduction of new products for artists often
(French, Saint-Quentin 1704 – 1788 Saint-Quentin)
coincided with commercial ventures, and in this case bounties for the discovery
15. Jacques Dumont le Romain (1701 – 1781)
of deposits of cobalt were offered in England.
Playing the Guitar, ca. 1742
Variations in the preparation of the supports for pastels, while reflecting the
Pastel on paper, 25½ x 21¾ in. (64.8 x 55.2 cm). Private
collection artists’ preferences, were driven largely by a quest for a tenacious surface and
often as well by a desire to simulate the effects of oil. It was perhaps for such
A native of Saint-Quentin in northern France,
the gifted pastelist (for he was exclusively a pas- reasons that Vigée Le Brun executed her carefully finished Duchesse de Guiche
telist) Maurice Quentin de La Tour arrived in (no.  28) on paper coated with highly impasted gesso, a painterly texture that
Paris in 1719 to apprentice with a painter called
Claude Dupouch (died 1747). The young La Tour’s enhances the reflection of light. By contrast, the amateur Abbé de Saint-Non
appearance on the scene was timely, as he had the chose for his Two Sisters (no. 14) a paper with a smooth gessolike ground, a sur-
opportunity to see the work of Rosalba Carriera
(see nos. 3, 4), who made a much-heralded visit
face suited for fine details, even though the pastel was executed with the same
to the French capital in 1720 – 21. La Tour settled bravura and thick strokes as the original oil by Fragonard that it copies.
permanently in Paris in 1727. Ten years later he
became a candidate member of the Académie
Despite the increased scale offered by plate glass, most pastel portraits con-
Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and showed formed approximately to the standard sizes of paper or fractions of those sizes.
at the Salon. He was received as a full member of
La Tour’s portrait of Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet (no. 16), for example, is 23¼
the Académie in 1746, having already been granted
lodgings at the Louvre. In 1748 La Tour sent to by 19¾ inches, dimensions suited to framing and to displaying in the cabinets,
the Salon pastel portraits of Louis XV, Queen
closets, and bedchambers then popular in domestic architecture. Small cabinet
Marie Leszczyńska, and the dauphin, becoming
for the balance of his long career one of the most pictures, a specialty of Gardner and Hamilton, allowed artists to work quickly
highly placed, successful, and prolific portraitists and keep costs low, whereas the monumental portraits made by La Tour and
in France.
Pastel was often employed as a relatively inti- Bachelier in the 1740s and by Russell and Hamilton toward the end of the cen-
mate medium of expression, and pastelists often tury effectively served as a sign of the patron’s wealth and demonstrated the
portrayed their fellow artists, especially, in rather
intimate terms. In this informal study of about crayon painter’s ability to compete with oil painters. Compositions that were far
1742 La Tour depicted his friend Jacques Dumont larger than handmade paper were produced by pasting several pieces or strips of
seated close to the picture plane, moving, it seems,
breathing, full of life. Dumont, born in Paris in paper to the canvas lining. In Vigée Le Brun’s Duchesse de Guiche (no. 28), which
1701 the son and brother of sculptors, became a measures 31¾  by 25¼ inches, two sheets are joined across the sitter’s torso; in
successful history and genre painter. He called
himself “le Romain,” the Roman, to emphasize the
Coypel’s double portrait (frontispiece), four sheets are abutted, with one seam,
importance for his development of a stay in Italy, rather incredibly, passing through the woman’s chin. Artists created such assem-
to which he walked as a young man. A candidate
in 1726 and admitted in 1728 to the Académie
blages to make use of small pieces of paper or to enlarge a composition to fit a
Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, he rejoiced in frame, as Capet did with her Jean Pierre Demetz (no. 32). Most extraordinary,
both political and administrative abilities, as he
however, are La Tour’s vast compositions, notably his six-foot-high portrait of
was appointed professor in 1736, rector in 1752, and
chancellor in 1768. Dumont showed regularly at President Rieux ( J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), in which multiple cut
the Salons and in 1748 became the first governor of
and torn papers corresponding to the face and parts of the drapery are superim-
the École des Élèves Protégés. Although he is little
known today, the various positions he held would posed on larger pieced sheets. For La Tour the technique not only served as a
have made him an invaluable contact for a younger means of achieving a larger image but also answered his need to correct his pas-
contemporary.
Dumont is not portrayed here in his official tels by collaging or reworking until the likeness had been perfectly captured.
guise. Instead he is at ease, playing the guitar and Subject to dust, readily abraded, attractive to insects (owing to binders, siz-
wearing an open coat over a partly unbuttoned
and rather tight red waistcoat. In the studio, ing, and mounting paste), its powdery surface was repeatedly held to be pastel’s
doubtless for warmth, artists often put on a brim- greatest flaw. In his correspondence with Rosalba Carriera the collector Pierre
less hat or a head scarf like the one Dumont wears
here. The skin of his neck and cleft chin and his Crozat lamented that these beautiful works were subject to spoiling. Diderot
slight beard are painted with finesse. The color described the “precious powder [that] will fly from its support, half of it scattered
of his waistcoat is picked up in the shadows on
his face and knuckles and the sleeves of his coat.
in the air and half clinging to Saturn’s long feathers.” Others opined that pastels
This pastel was exhibited at the 1742 Salon under required shielding from the deleterious effects of the air, that they were more
the title “M. du Mont le Romain, professeur de
l’académie royale . . . jouant de la guitare.” La Tour
liable to injury than other kinds of painting, and that they were impossible to
made a preliminary drawing of the sitter’s head clean. There was no question that pastels needed to be protected. Throughout the

27
28
in black and white chalks with pastel highlights
(now in the Cleveland Museum of Art) and used
it for this and also for a second portrait (Musée
du Louvre, Paris) showing Dumont in a similar
pose but at his painting table with his palette and
brushes. The later work was well received at the
Salon of 1748 but then suffered an unsuccessful
reworking by the artist.
La Tour reached the height of his powers in
1748 and presented no fewer than fifteen pastels at
that year’s biennial Salon. He numbered among
his sitters not only the king and queen and the
dauphin (whose splendid portraits are in the
Louvre), but also the three most powerful mili-
tary figures in France at the end of the War of the
Austrian Succession (1740 – 48): the maréchaux de
Lowendal, de Saxe, and de Belle-Isle. This por-
trait of Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet, duc de
Belle-Isle, general, diplomat, maréchal (from 1741)
and peer of France (1748), can be securely identi-
fied among the 1748 exhibits. Fouquet advanced in
the military from an early age, overcoming family
disgrace, political adversity, capture, and impris-
onment. He served in the wars of the Spanish
(1701 – 14), Polish (1733 – 38), and Austrian succes-
sions and finally, from 1758 until 1761, as secretary
of state for war.
The duc de Belle-Isle wears the blue ribbon
and cross of the Order of the Holy Spirit together
with the red ribbon and pendant of the Order of
the Golden Fleece over a heavily gold-embroidered
coat. The costume is rendered with care, the artist
mimicking the several textures of velvet, watered
silk, and metal thread to perfection. A wig with
waves of tightly drawn curls tied with black ribbons
sets off the sitter’s face, which is largely unwrinkled,
with a high forehead and prominent bony struc-
ture. By contrast with the costume, the face is
rendered in a sort of blizzard of separate strokes of
a wide variety of colors and tones that manage to
suggest a character that is noble, complex, and
arrogantly self-assured. The pose mirrors that of the image is somewhat smaller. La Tour, working ments for the Luxembourg and Tuileries palaces.
the king and the dauphin, although the format is to impress, succeeded with this sparkling image. He commissioned from La Tour a portrait that
restricted to less than half-length, and the size of Jean Charles Garnier d’Isle was admitted to was exhibited at the Salon of 1751. It may have
membership in the Académie Royale d’Architec­ been this one, but that cannot be proved, as there
ture in 1728. He must have owed his eventual are three undated pastels by La Tour that rep-
advancement in part to family connections: his resent Garnier. Another of the same size (Fogg
wife was the daughter of the prominent architect Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.) is a half-length
Maurice Quentin de La Tour Claude Desgotz, who was related to, and trained portrait showing him facing left but seated in
16. Charles Louis Auguste Fouquet under, the celebrated French landscape archi- a damask-upholstered chair and wearing a gray
(1684 – 1761), Maréchal de France and tect André Le Nôtre. Garnier’s rise to influence moiré silk coat, and the third is a smaller head-
Duc de Belle-Isle, ca. 1748 coincided with the ascendency of Madame de and-shoulders study (Musée Antoine Lécuyer,
Pompadour as Louis XV’s mistress, and his name Saint-Quentin) in which he wears the same gray
Pastel on paper, 23¼ x 19¾ in. (59 x 50 cm). Private
is associated with the design of formal gardens coat. Garnier’s double chin and ample figure
collection
at several properties remodeled or constructed are de-emphasized in the Museum’s pastel. It is
for her use. These include Crécy, which the king highly finished and shows La Tour’s impeccable
bought in 1746; Bellevue, where several years later handling of details of costume, which pale by
17. Jean Charles Garnier d’Isle (1697 – 1755), Madame de Pompadour built a small château; comparison with the fleeting and perhaps rather
ca. 1750 and the Hermitage at Fontainebleau, a project self-satisfied smile on the sitter’s face.
Pastel and gouache on blue paper, laid down on undertaken in 1749. In 1747 Garnier was appointed La Tour is equally famous for his engaging
canvas; 253/8 x 21¼ in. (64.5 x 54 cm). The Metropoli- director of the Gobelins tapestry manufactory; and unique préparations. These present a first,
tan Museum of Art, Purchase, Walter and Leonore in 1748 he became an associate member of the spontaneous record of the expression of the sitter
Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation Gift, Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture and taken from life. Such pastel drawings may show
2002 (2002.439) assumed the powerful post of contrôleur des bâti- just the mask of the face, or they may include

29
 Maurice Quentin de La Tour
18. Préparation for a Portrait of Louis XV
(1710 – 1774), ca. 1745
Pastel on blue paper, original sheet 127/8 x 9½ in. (32.7 x
24 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of
Mary Tavener Holmes, in honor of Donald Posner,
2005 (2005.66)

indications of the hair and the neck and shoulders.

In 2005 the Metropolitan was fortunate to receive
as a gift a préparation by La Tour of Louis XV.
After it left the artist’s hands, probably at a time
when such preliminary studies were less highly
valued, it was strengthened in the background and
extended so as to appear finished. For this exhibi-
tion the additions have been masked and the por-
trait head is shown as it was originally intended, a
study for an important royal commission, a pastel
of the young king that La Tour exhibited at the
Salon of 1745 (the finished portrait is now in a
private collection). Images of Louis XV tend to be
uncompromisingly stiff, emphasizing the distance
between the monarch and his subjects, but this
sketch is sprightly, animated by the highlights and
by the angle of the king’s glance.
No less compelling is Abbé Reynal’s ironic
expression, as limited as is the application of col-
ored strokes in this study of the mask of his face.
Born Guillaume Thomas François Reynal in 1713,
the abbé acquired his ecclesiastical title when he
took Jesuit orders. He was later released from the
church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, possibly because
of his liberal views. A contributor to the magazine
Mercure de France, Reynal was well known as the
author of Histoire des deux Indes (History of the
East and West Indies), a multivolume philosophi-
cal and political treatise published in 1770. The
treatise, which contained diatribes denouncing the
cruel treatment of subject peoples by European
eighteenth century this was accomplished primarily with plate glass, which had
colonists, was banned by the Church in 1774.
become available internationally through trade with France and, by 1773, England. Reynal was exiled from France in 1781 but re-
Around midcentury a controversy arose in Paris regarding the efficacy of glass in turned and was elected to the Estates General in
1789. Horrified by the violence of the revolution-
preserving these fragile works. It was proposed that the powder be solidified ary movement, he declined to serve and lived out
with a permeating colorless liquid, an idea that had been experimented with in his life in seclusion.
Because pastels must be glazed and sealed at
the seventeenth century. The revitalization of the proposal correlated with the the back to protect the surfaces from dust, their
Enlightenment’s preoccupation with preserving art for posterity. In France the original frames and backing materials are often
preserved and may reveal contemporary inscrip-
pervasive fascination with fixatives emerged as the royal arts administration tions or old labels identifying the artist or the sitter.
sought to raise the declining standards of the Académie Royale and transform La Tour’s unfinished préparations, however, were
made for his own use, and he kept them in his
the Louvre into a national museum. Though this official program was centered studio, probably in portfolios rather than framed,
on efforts to “guarantee immortality to oil paintings” by restoration, the numer- until his death (many are in the Musée Antoine
Lécuyer). It is difficult, therefore, to identify an un-
ous transactions on fixatives testify to an equally fervent campaign to find a named sitter for a préparation or to tell if the same
surface coating that would ensure the longevity of pastels. person is represented more than once. A case in
point is this study of a woman who may be Marie
So great was the enthusiasm for preserving pastels with elixirs of glue and Anne Botot, whose stage name was Mademoiselle
varnish that fixative makers and pastelists across Europe stepped forward with Dangeville. Botot performed with éclat at the

30
Maurice Quentin de La Tour inventions. These substances were advertised in journals or demonstrated in the
19. Préparation for a Portrait of the Abbé forums of learned societies, whose endorsements inspired public confidence and
Reynal (1713 – 1796), ca. 1750 – 55
sales. The proceedings of the Académie Royale record several diverse inventions
Pastel on paper, 12½ x 95/8 in. (31.8 x 24.4 cm). Private
collection
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
20. Préparation for a Portrait of Mademoiselle
Dangeville (Marie Anne Botot, 1714 – 1796), first presented in 1763 (though its secret was not revealed until 1780). Loriot
ca. 1750 demonstrated his fixative’s invisibility to the Académie by coating it on only half
Pastel on blue paper, laid down on canvas; 113/8 x 91/8 in. of the pastel portrait of Loriot himself that the painter Jean Valade had exhibited
(29 x 23.3 cm). The Pierpont Morgan Library, New
York, Purchased on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow
at the Salon that year (it is now in the Musée Antoine Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin).
Fund, 1978 (1981.12) Another approbation was given for paper sponged with “special” oil that stabi-
lized 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 fin-
Comédie Française from 1730 until 1763. A labeled ger without being displaced or to be varnished (thus eliminating the need for
black chalk drawing showing her smiling face in
three-quarter view is in the Musée du Louvre, protective glass), cleaned, or retouched. For pastels that had lost their vivacity,
Paris, and a pastel made from the drawing is in there were fixatives that could regenerate colors and “recover a new luster.” La
Saint-Quentin. In both works her cheeks are wider
and her brow lower than the sitter’s here. What is Tour boasted that his brilliant pastels were fixed with his special recipe, which
most striking about this study is the way it pre- impaired neither nuances nor freshness. So vibrant were his pastels that Salon
serves the lively warmth of this engaging woman’s
character, whoever she may be. La Tour used his
critic Abbé Le Blanc reverentially predicted in 1747 that they would “last as long
favorite blue to great effect. The voids between as is given to human things to last.”
the strokes at the hairline indicate the volume of
her hair, and contour strokes varying in color and
The importance of fixatives both commercially and as demonstrations of
thickness suggest a shade of thought or motion. practical science is supported by the numerous accounts of their availability,

31
32
Jean Baptiste Perronneau
(French, Paris 1715 – 1783 Amsterdam)

21. Olivier Journu (1724 – 1764), 1756

Pastel on blue-gray laid paper, laid down on canvas;
227/8 x 18½ in. (58.1 x 47 cm). Signed and dated
in graphite at upper right: Perronneau  / 1756. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wrightsman Fund,
2003 (2003.26)

22. Portrait of a Man (probably Monsieur de

Beauséjour, 1725 – 1807), 1756
Pastel on blue paper, laid down on canvas; 21¾ x 17½ in.
(55 x 44 cm). Signed in graphite at upper right:
Perronneau; on backing: Juillet 1756 –   / par Perronneau.
The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, Purchased
on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Fund, 1978 (1984.6)

Jean Baptiste Perronneau, a Parisian of bourgeois

birth, was in his maturity exclusively a portraitist.
A pupil of the engraver Laurent Cars (1699 – 1771),
he may also have studied with Hubert Drouais
(1699 – 1767) or Charles Joseph Natoire (1700 –  
1777). For some time Perronneau was employed as
an engraver, and he later worked in both oils and
pastel. He was admitted a candidate of the Acadé-
mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1746
and was received in 1753, upon presentation of
two portraits in oils. By this time the precocious
Maurice Quentin de La Tour (see nos. 15 – 20), a
decade older, had already captured the market for
pastels among the aristocracy in Paris and at the
court of Versailles. Although Perronneau had
many Salon exhibits to his credit and was admired
as an exceptional color­ist, after his admission to
the Académie and his marriage, in 1754, he most
often sought his clientele among the upper mid-
dle classes and outside the French capital, thus
becoming an itinerant artist for the balance of his
life. He worked in various French cities, including Backgrounds are neutral, delicately modulated Mass.). Olivier Journu has the square jaw and
Orléans (as early as 1744), Toulouse (where he tones that serve as a foil for and do not detract dark brows typical of his family, and his eyes are
showed at the Salon of 1758), and Bordeaux (inter- from the faces and the costumes. It was Per- brilliant turquoise blue. With his coat and waist-
mittently between 1755 and 1769). He may have ronneau’s practice to sign and date his works in coat, which are the color of a ripe peach, he wears
been in Italy in 1759, he visited Amsterdam more pencil, which is visible only upon close inspection, a ruffle of point d’Alençon lace and an artfully
than once, and in 1781 he reportedly traveled to and the information these inscriptions provide is arranged corsage of tea roses. There is a slight
Saint Petersburg. essential to our understanding of this gifted, too sway to his pose, and although his expression
It was perhaps a matter of expediency rather little known artist. is opaque, he appears to be acutely aware of his
than of his clients’ taste that Perronneau often In 1756 Perronneau was in Bordeaux to paint appearance and the impression he makes.
painted frontal or three-quarter-view pastel a younger member of the wealthy and cultivated The male portrait by Perronneau from the
portraits of less than half-length format, many Journu family of merchants, and he returned Morgan Library is of the same high quality, size,
of them ovals, which saved him the trouble of there the following year. Madame Claude Journu, and date as the pastel of Journu and has a similar
painting his sitters’ hands. He generally omitted born Jeanne Olivier, was the widowed mother of palette. The two are a study in contrasts, however,
attributes and still life details. Gifted at depict- six daughters and a dozen sons, one of whom, as the Morgan’s sitter, if equally self-possessed,
ing luminous velvets and the sheen of silk, he at Bernard, called Olivier, born in 1724, was the sit- looks businesslike rather than disinterestedly lan-
the same time did not hesitate to describe the ter for the Metropolitan Museum’s pastel. The guorous. He is not seated but stands in a conven-
wrinkles of aging sitters, who in accepting these success of Olivier’s portrait apparently engen- tional pose, his hat under his arm. His rather
portraits evidently valued his honesty. Perronneau dered at least a half-dozen further commissions sharply drawn hairline suggests a wig rather than
achieved his expressive characterizations with from family members, including oil paintings of his own hair; the hair ribbon, with its blue high-
effort; his pastels may show evidence of rework- Bonaventure Journu, his brother Jacques, Abbé lights, reads as if it were the collar of his coat.
ing, especially in the area of the sitters’ mouths Journu-Dumoncey, and their mother, the first Perronneau drew attention to the man’s sharp,
and chins. His oeuvre is remarkable for the subtle from 1767, the third dating to 1769 (all three now focused glance, shapely mouth, cleft chin, and
variety of coloring in the lights and shadows. belong to the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, freshly shaven cheek. Reworkings to the right of

33
 Jean Baptiste Perronneau
23. Madame Augustin Prosper Tassin de La
Renardière (Madeleine Monique Seurrat,
1744 – 1820), 1765
Pastel on paper, laid down on panel, oval; 24½ x 19 in.
(62.2 x 48.3 cm). Signed and dated in graphite on upper
right edge: Perronneau  / 1765. Private collection

the lace ruffle indicate that he made adjustments

to the silhouette of the figure, and the lace jabot is
perhaps not quite finished. The sitter’s identity has
not been established with certainty. He was called
Monsieur de Beauséjour when, in 1890, the pastel
was discovered in the possession of a Monsieur
Lalimant at the Château de La Touratte on the
outskirts of Bordeaux. Beauséjour was a native of
Bordeaux. His real name was Jérôme de Chassaing,
and he was a man of property remembered for his
generosity. The quills on the original frame suggest
that he was a writer.
Perronneau was also a frequent visitor to
Orléans, where he is recorded in 1765, 1766, and
1767, and where Monsieur and Madame Tassin de
La Renardière were among his sitters. The Tassins
had lived in the city for hundreds of years and
by the eighteenth century owned properties in
the surrounding countryside. Their wealth came
principally from sugar refining (cane from the
colonies shipped by way of the Loire to Orléans
was processed and forwarded by canal barge to
Paris to be sold throughout France). Madame
Tassin was born Madeleine Monique Seurrat
in 1744, the daughter of the Orléanais Étienne
Augustin Seurrat de la Barre (1707 – 1777). Seur-
rat’s family engaged Perronneau as a portraitist
on a number of occa­sions, and both Monique and
her sister, Avoie Catherine Seurrat de la Grand
Cour (1742 – 1824), sat for him with their husbands
in 1765. The pendant portrait of Monsieur Tas-
sin de La Renardière (1728 – 1815), which bears a
label identifying the sitter on the reverse, is in
the Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Both pastels were
methods for applying them, and their inventors that appeared from the 1750s in the hands of Madame Tassin’s descendants
until at least 1910.) It shows a haughty gentle-
through the 1780s, at the height of pastel’s popularity. Most of these accounts
man of thirty-seven in a pink waistcoat. Tassin
came from France. In England, which lacked a centralized arts administration, had probably married in 1763, and his wife was
exhibitions open to public scrutiny, and, until 1754, an established art academy, the mother of a son born in 1764 and perhaps of
another infant. In her portrait she looks no more
the subject was far less charged, despite the many pastelists working there. than her age at the time, twenty-one. Her clothes
Russell, for one, dismissed the “Method of fixing Crayon Pictures” devised by “an are beautiful, but her hair, dressed to an absurd
height, padded, and powdered, towers threaten-
ingenious Foreigner” because it imparted a “cold and purple” hue to pastels; he ingly over her slightly wary young face with its
considered fixatives useful only as protection should the glazing break. Among inquiring brown eyes. The pink, white, gray, and
green modeling tones that shape the head and neck
the recipes that were formulated for fixatives the best were generally thought to are of a powdery delicacy that could not have been
be made of isinglass (fish glue from the swim bladders of Caspian Sea sturgeon achieved with oil paint.

mixed with spirits of wine), to which might be added Kirschwasser or eau de vie
to speed penetration and evaporation and vinegar and rue to deter insects. In
pursuit of improvement the Royal Society in London offered premiums for a
comparable product made from fish swimming in American rivers.

34
Jean Baptiste Greuze
(French, Tournus 1725 – 1805 Paris)

24. Head of a Young Woman Wearing a

Bonnet Facing to Left, ca. 1765
Pastel on paper, 117/8 x 95/8 in. (30.2 x 24.4 cm). Private
collection

The son of a roofer, Jean Baptiste Greuze was

born in Tournus, near Dijon. He was equally
gifted, and prolific, as a painter and a draftsman
but worked rarely in pastel. In 1755 he was re-
ceived into the Paris Académie de Peinture et de
Sculpture as an associate in the category of genre
painter, exhibiting for the first time. After study-
ing in Rome he returned to the French capital
to participate in the 1757 Salon, to which he sent
Italian scenes, portraits, and study heads. Among
his 1759 Salon exhibits were two pastels, one iden-
tified simply as a head, the other a portrait of his
patron Ange Laurent de La Live de Jully. Greuze
finally submitted his reception piece to the Aca-
démie in 1769 and was deeply aggrieved when he
was admitted not as a history painter but, again,
in the lesser category of genre. (He was to exhibit
publicly on only two further occasions, thirty years
later, at the Salon.) He achieved enormous suc-
cess nevertheless, and in 1777, at Passy, was given
sittings by Benjamin Franklin for portraits in oil
and pastel (the pastel belongs to the United States
Department of State, Washington, D.C.). He died
in his studio at the Louvre at eighty.
Greuze had exceptional command of the mate-
rials of drawing, ably employing red, black, and
white chalk; pastels; and brush with ink washes
over graphite. His greatest skill was in the depic-
tion of genre subjects, but he was also an excellent More diverse were the methods recommended for applying fixatives, which
portraitist, and he had a gift for capturing the
expressive faces of young women, usually models,
though often fraught with hazards captivated audiences in an era fascinated
though not to the exclusion of either children or with scientific spectacles. Artists were advised to hold the composition vertically
elderly men, and for embodying shades of emotion
and spray the solution with the quickly released bristles of a stiff brush to pro-
of every kind.
Greuze married Anne Gabrielle Babuti (1732  –   duce an imperceptible shower; apply the solution with a brush through gauze
ca. 1812) on February 3, 1759. The first of their chil-
placed above the pastel or paint it onto the back of the canvas-mounted paper;
dren was born at the end of that year and probably
died young; the second, Caroline, came in 1762, float the pastel faceup in a basin of warm solution; or apply pastel to a still wet
and the third, Louise, in 1764. Madame Greuze varnished support to ensure the penetration of the powder.
was beautiful and seductive, and it is thought
that the artist’s personal circumstances during Claims for the ability of fixatives to enhance the longevity of works in pastel
this happy and successful period influenced not must have been persuasive. Liotard advised his patron Lord Bessborough to have
only his choice of subjects  —  notably A Marriage
Contract (1761; Musée du Louvre, Paris) and The his pastels fixed by a specialist from Geneva, and Loriot profited from his inven-
Beloved Mother (1765; National Gallery of Art, tion by fixing the works of several pastelists. But such promises were not, in fact,
Washington, D.C.)  —  but also the sensitivity with
which he depicted them. The marriage eventually realistic. Unlike varnishes on oil paintings, which serve to enliven colors, surface
collapsed on account of the wanton behavior of coatings on pastels are antithetical to their most desirable feature, their optical
Madame Greuze, however, and in the artist’s later
work some of the women assume the role of the
properties. When a liquid substance is applied to a powder it penetrates between
harridan that she became. the particles, filling the voids. As a result the powder is compressed, irregularities
Greuze showed portraits of his wife that are
presumed lost at the Salons of 1761, 1763, and
in the surface are reduced, and light can no longer be diffusely reflected. Instead,
1765. His 1765 exhibits also included The Beloved reflection is uniform and the matte surface may appear glossy and the colors

35
36
Jean Baptiste Greuze
25. Baptiste aîné (born 1761), ca. 1790
Pastel on off-white paper, affixed to blue paper, laid
down on canvas; 17¾ x 14¾ in. (45.1 x 37.5 cm). The
Frick Collection, New York, Purchased with funds
bequeathed in memory of Suzanne and Denise Falk,
1996 (1996.3.126)

26. Madame Baptiste, ca. 1790

Pastel on off-white paper, laid down on canvas; 18 x
143/8 in. (45.6 x 36.6 cm). The Frick Collection, New
York, Purchased with funds bequeathed in memory of
Suzanne and Denise Falk, 1996 (1996.3.127)

Mother, a highly expressive study of a woman’s

head in pastel and colored chalks that a contem-
porary critic identified as a depiction of Madame
Greuze. Head of a Young Woman Wearing a Bon-
net may be yet another. The sitter shares certain
physical characteristics  —  slight double chin, sharp
nose, and fine, pale eyebrows  —  with the sitter
for the Washington sheet, and the existence of
several painted and drawn variants of the com-
position may support the identification. The
soft coloring of the face is enhanced by the deli-
cate shading of the bonnet in blue and gray. In
the eighteenth century such bonnets with many
lappets were worn indoors and out by married
women, and sometimes girls, of the middle and
serving classes.
The actor Nicolas Pierre Baptiste Anselme was
distinguished by his great height (he was nick-
named “Le Télégraphe”), and the many portraits
of him usually emphasize either his very long legs
or his very long nose. None is as attractive as this
one. Anselme was born in Bordeaux in 1761. He
came from a family of performers and was called
Baptiste aîné to distinguish him from his father,
Baptiste l’ancien. In his early twenties he was
married in Rouen to Anne Françoise Gourville, darker. Fortunately, the vast majority of pastels that survive from the eighteenth
an actress who proved to be more successful in
her private life than on the stage, from which she
century were not fixed.
soon withdrew. Anselme had a flourishing career in Unlike pastelists’ materials, their technical practices were judged not by phil-
Paris beginning in about 1791 and belonged to the
osophical societies but rather by patrons and critics. Certain criteria prevailed.
company at the Comédie Française from 1799 until
his retirement in 1828. Well known to the theater- Pastelists were expected to work with a vast assortment of crayons and to apply
going public, he was popular both as a theatrical them so as to portray their sitters with verisimilitude. This standard of realis-
personality and as an individual. Greuze’s portrait
of Baptiste aîné in blue and white complements tic representation, widely appreciated by amateurs and connoisseurs alike, was
the rosy color harmonies of the companion portrait based on a time-honored concept of painting redefined by Roger de Piles as an
of Madame Baptiste. With its wiry, decisive strokes,
especially in the powdered hair, it is the more imitation of nature, an “artifice” whose purpose is to deceive. The importance of
forthright and sculptural of the two. The expanse resemblance, Piles said, was “doubly so in a portrait; which not only represents
of white linen suggests the actor’s long neck and
also his height. A sharp light shines on his forehead, a man in general, but such an one as may be distinguished from all others.”  The
and the fluttering white ties give the image a touch picture-viewing public greatly enjoyed masquerades, images, and dialogues that
of theater. Madame Baptiste’s pensive expression
reveals little. In the most beautiful passages of her expressed the ambiguity between reality and deception; they were fascinated
portrait Greuze contrasted the flushed skin of her with mirrors and trompe l’oeil effects and relished satirical references to analo-
neck and breast with her pale pink scarf. Like
many of Greuze’s voluptuous women, she exudes
gies between the artifice of face paint and pastel painting (not least the powdery
an aura of lassitude and inanition. rouge that could be fixed with Loriot’s secret elixir) or between “sweetening” or
37
38
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard blending pastel and caressing the flesh. Due to their diffuse reflection of light,
(French, Paris 1749 – 1803 Paris)
pastel likenesses are convincing, and they were especially so to the eighteenth-
27. Madame Élisabeth de France (1764 – 1794),
century eye. La Tour’s subjects, which one Salon critic described as “exuding
ca. 1787 (detail)
Pastel on blue paper, seven sheets joined, laid down
life,” appear to pause, as though they have just been interrupted. Madame Royer
on canvas, oval; 31 x 25¾ in. (78.7 x 65.4 cm). The invites the viewer to join her. Olivier Journu’s lace cravat begs to be touched. And
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Frederick
M. Stafford, 2007 (2007.441)
the young gentleman in Coypel’s double portrait extends his hand in welcome.
That the image, made of colored dust, would disappear if one touched it height-
By the time she married a Monsieur Guiard in ened the sense of marvel.
1769 (they separated in 1779), Adélaïde Labille
had already embarked upon a career as an artist. Producing a just imitation of nature with this powdery material made excep-
She studied first with François Élie Vincent, a tional technical demands on artists. The medium required numerous crayons, it
miniaturist whose Paris studio was in the same
street as her father’s shop. In the early 1770s she
lacked transparency, and it could not form a solid film. Making changes was dif-
learned the techniques of pastel from Maurice ficult. Although La Tour anguished over these limitations, he never described
Quentin de La Tour (see nos. 15–20), and in 1776
she entered the studio of her childhood friend
precisely how he mastered them. Apart from Russell, who wrote a manual, no
François André Vincent, François Élie’s son, to eighteenth-century pastelist left detailed descriptions of his or her technique;
study oil painting. Labille-Guiard was exclusively
both professionals and amateurs usually took instruction from a master and so
a portraitist (then considered an appropriate genre
for a woman), and while she was a fine painter in had no need of written instructions. Unlike oil painting, which was codified, the
oils she seems always to have preferred the pastel
practice of pastel, though it did have particular methods, was a mutable process,
medium. Together with Madame Vigée Le Brun
(see nos. 28–30), she was admitted to membership subject to the innovations of the artist.
in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculp- A pastel typically began with a sketch directly on the prepared support.
ture in 1783, and she exhibited at least ten pastels
at the Salon that year. Later, she was taken up by Because of the opacity of the pastel layer, underdrawing in red or black chalk that
the Mesdames de France, the elderly maiden aunts reveals the artist’s first thoughts is rarely visible to the naked eye, though black
of Louis XVI, who became her most important
patrons. Labille-Guiard devoted herself to the chalk or other carbon-based media can be detected using infrared reflectography.
teaching and advancement of women artists. She Examining Mengs’s Pleasure (no. 6) by this means shows that he made substantial
stayed in France throughout the revolution and
easily secured commissions from its leading fig- changes in his original design. Copley applied summary outlines only for the
ures. In 1800 she married her teacher and longtime dress in Mrs. Edward Green’s likeness (no. 7). But few portraitists developed their
com­panion, the painter Vincent.
Labille-Guiard most often presented her cli-
conception in separate studies. La Tour’s head studies (see nos. 18–20) are unique
ents in bust- or half-length against a solid-color in that they served either as models for future portraits or, silhouetted and pasted
shaded ground. Their features and mobile glances
are always highly individualized. She seems to
down, as components of final compositions. Highly finished or quickly rendered,
have had a taste for relatively simple attire that many of La Tour’s préparations were heavily worked in pastel, with a barrier layer
she could not always indulge; in her pastels she
of fixative added to solidify the underlying powder to allow corrections with addi-
painted clothes, jewelry, and furnishings with
care but rarely permitted them to detract from tional color, a technique that he applied in Jean Charles Garnier d’Isle (no. 17).
her subject’s unflinching gaze. As was her usual
Having established the primary conception, the artist lightly applied the dead
practice, Labille-Guiard must have painted this
pastel portrait of Madame Élisabeth de France, color, or first layer of crayon. Unlike oils, in which muted colors were subsequently
the youngest sister of Louis XVI, from life, bring- enlivened with glazes, pastel paintings started with bright hues, such as grada-
ing it to a high degree of finish in preparation for
the larger and more elaborate portrait in oils (now tions of carmine and lake interspersed with green, and tints with admixtures of
in a private collection) she exhibited at the Salon black. Thinly applied in flat masses, these formed the chromatic foundation and
of 1787, where it received high praise. Orphaned at
the age of three, Madame Élisabeth was devoted basic structure of the portrait. The “second coloring” followed, without an isolat-
to her brother and close to her maiden aunts. A pi- ing layer. Rather than using light tints, which would work their way up and impart
ous and highly educated young woman, she seems
to have led a blameless life. She accom­panied the a dull effect, the artist developed the composition in dark, rich colors that would
king and Marie Antoinette to the Temple and fol- later be subdued. To create unity and harmony, colors were applied simultane-
lowed them to the guillotine. Here the princess’s
costume—a simple redingote with gold buttons
ously to the entire composition, more thickly to the head of the sitter than the
and a starched fichu—sets off her regular features background in order to emphasize its volume. To protect it from falling pastel
and accords well with her gentle, reserved manner.
A muslin cap rests on her lightly powdered hair, its
dust, a particular hazard of this medium, the final modeling of the face was left
individual strands picked out in delicate colors. for last. The process of building up the second layer varied. For many artists, such

39
40
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun
(French, Paris 1755 – 1842 Paris)

28. The Duchesse de Guiche (Aglaé de Polignac,

1768 – 1803), 1784
Pastel on paper, two sheets joined, laid down on canvas,
oval; 31¾ x 25¼ in. (80.5 x 64 cm). Signed and dated at
lower left: Mde Le Brun  / 1784. Private collection

The daughter of Louis Vigée, a Parisian pastelist

of modest ability, Élisabeth Louise Vigée would
become one of the most gifted of women artists.
She was precocious and largely self-taught and
was painting commissioned portraits before she
was twenty. In 1774 she joined the Académie de
Saint Luc. Two years later she married the art
dealer Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun (1748 – 1813)
and in 1780 gave birth to their only child, Julie.
The young portraitist was summoned to Versailles
in 1778 to take sittings for a full-length court por-
trait of Marie Antoinette (now at Schloss Ambras
in Innsbruck). The queen admired her and ensured
that despite her husband’s profession, which would
otherwise have excluded her, Vigée Le Brun was
admitted in 1783 to the Académie Royale de Pein-
ture et de Sculpture and accorded access to the
Salon, where she was well received. With the
coming of the French Revolution she was obliged
to flee and set off for Italy, Austria, and Saint
Petersburg, where in 1800 she was elected to the
Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. She spent several
years in England and did not return to Paris per-
manently until 1805. Wherever she traveled she
had no difficulty securing important patrons for
her portraits.
While she was primarily a painter in oils,
Vigée Le Brun would have been familiar with
pastels from an early age, and although relatively
few of her works in this medium survive, she was
highly skilled with pastel crayons and used them
quite frequently. Her portrait of the duchesse de
Guiche, perhaps her finest pastel, was completed
in 1784. The sitter, christened Louise Françoise
Gabrielle Aglaé, was born in Paris on May 7, 1768,
the daughter of Comte and Comtesse Jules de
Polignac. Her mother was intimate with Marie
Antoinette, and through the good offices of the
king and queen the noble but impoverished
Polignacs rose quickly in wealth and power. In
1784, when this portrait of her daughter was
commissioned, Yolande de Polignac was govern-
ess to the royal children. At Versailles on July 4,
1780, Aglaé married Antoine Louis Marie de
Gramont, duc de Guiche and much later duc
de Gramont, who held important positions in
Louis XVI’s household. She was twelve and he
was twice her age. The king supplied her dowry.
The couple had a splendid apartment at Ver-
sailles and embarked upon a life of luxury and
privilege. By 1789 they had three children. Deeply
unpopular, they were obliged to flee France and
eventually settled in England, where Aglaé died
in 1803. Her portrait is very ancien régime. It

41
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun Ménageot, director of the Académie de France in Corisande, a slender young woman with large
Rome at the time of Vigée Le Brun’s arrival there dark eyes, wears the Neoclassical dress and gauze
29. Self-portrait, 1789 in late November 1789. She and Ménageot were scarf then in style. The striking contrast between
Pastel on paper, 195/8 x 15¾ in. (50 x 40 cm). Inscribed close friends, and this beautiful image was per- this portrait and that of Corisande’s mother
on backing: 28. novbre 1816  / Légué par Mr Menageot  / à haps her gift to him. It is executed in a narrow (no. 28) demonstrates the marked change in the
Mme Nigris —  / Ce dessin représente Mme Le Brun  / il est range of pale transparent colors with a light touch, style (simpler) and substance (more direct) of
fait par elle-même. Private collection the face more finished than the costume. Vigée Le French portraiture that occurred in consequence
Brun wears a coat with a cape collar and a gauze of the French Revolution.
30. Lady Ossulston (Corisande de Gramont, fichu and bonnet, the bonnet delicately fluted in
1783 – 1865), ca. 1806 soft gray and white strokes with black accents.
Her dress is more that of citizeness than courtier.
Pastel on paper, laid down on canvas; 18 x 13¼ in. The sitter, with her delicate skin, looks young and
(45.7 x 33.7 cm). Private collection Pierre Paul Prud’hon
vulnerable, although she was thirty-four at the
(French, Cluny 1758 – 1823 Paris)
time and the mother of a nine-year-old.
Lady Ossulston, born in 1783 and baptized 31. Nicolas Perchet, 1795
shows a married woman of the highest rank in Corisande Armandine Sophie Léonie Hélène,
Pastel on blue-gray paper, oval; 15¾ x 12¼ in. (40 x 31 cm).
the guise of a peasant, coy, sensual, and acutely was Aglaé de Polignac’s daughter. Because of
Princeton University Art Museum, Museum Purchase,
self-aware. Her costume could perhaps have been her family’s close ties in England, Corisande, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund (2010-15)
worn at the little village near the Petit Trianon having escaped from Paris while still a child,
at Versailles that was then being built for the was brought up in the household of William,
amusement of Marie Antoinette. Her bodice is 5th Duke of Devonshire, and his wife Georgiana. Pierre Paul Prud’hon, from Cluny in southern
laced with a quantity of pinked ribbons; her cap is Although the young woman was a refugee with- Burgundy and the son of a stonemason, came to
edged with lace. The flushes of color are blended, out financial resources, owing to her connections the attention of his parish priest and was sent at
and the surface is pristine and highly finished. she was able to find an eligible husband neverthe- public expense to the Dijon drawing academy
Pastel crayons are portable, so it is not surpris- less. According to the registers of Saint George’s of François Devosge (1732 – 1811). Prud’hon was
ing to find a pastel self-portrait of Vigée Le Brun Church in Hanover Square, on July 28, 1806, at orphaned in 1776. In 1780, with sponsorship from
wearing traveling clothes that she painted in Devonshire House, London, she married Charles a private patron, he departed for Paris to enroll at
Italy not long after her forced departure from the Augustus Bennet, Lord Ossulston, who in 1822 the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.
French capital. According to an inscription on the would succeed as the 5th Earl of Tankerville and Three years later he returned to Dijon to take up
original backing the work was bequeathed to in the meantime held several seats in Parliament. his first public commission, for a ceiling decora-
Vigée Le Brun’s daughter, Madame Nigris, by After he died in 1859 the pastel descended in the tion. In 1784 he won the Prix de Rome, and late
Monsieur Ménageot, that is, François Guillaume family until recently. that year he departed for Rome, where he stud-

42
 as Carriera, Liotard, and Mengs, it would on occasion entail combining pastel
powder with water, gum, or fixative and applying the mixture with a brush or rub-
bing it on with a wetted finger. More typically — and this is what distinguishes
pastel from other media — discrete strokes were applied with a separate dry crayon
for each hue and the graphic marks transformed into painterly ones with the side
or tip of a crayon, a finger, a stump, or a tight spiral of leather or paper. To build
up the composition, color was repeatedly stumped and reapplied, each stage or
ied the works of antiquity and the Renaissance
detail requiring one of the tools for its effect. Often referred to as “sweetening,”
and met Antonio Canova (see no. 34). Prud’hon this technique was critical, as smooth, blended gradations, best achieved with soft
returned to Paris toward the end of 1788 only to
pastels, were vital to producing varied textures and to attaining a high degree of
find his career interrupted by the onset of the
French Revolution. He moved with his family to finish. Moderation was essential to avoid compressing the powder and reducing
Franche-Comté. He had exhibited several works
its clarity and brilliance; once it was overworked the powder became embedded
at the Salon of 1793 (Year 2 of the Revolutionary
Calendar) and continued to show regularly in in the support and the effect of freshness was difficult to regain, as correction was
the capital, receiving notices of various kinds. In limited to scraping with knives or erasing with bread crumbs. Yet being too timid
1796 he was provided with a studio at the Louvre.
Prud’hon supervised the decoration of the capital was also a risk. Russell warned crayon painters to avoid a “thin and scanty effect
for the coronation of Napoléon as emperor in [having] more the appearance of a Drawing than a solid Painting.”
1804, painted the empress Josephine, and after the
emperor’s divorce and remarriage became drawing The method by which the strokes were applied and stumped accounted
master to the empress Marie Louise. He showed for the overall effect of a pastel. Often different techniques were used in the
his work until 1822. When he died in 1823 he was
honored not only as a portraitist but also as a
painter of mythological, historical, and allegorical
subjects.
Prud’hon had extensive traditional training
and study in Dijon, Paris, and Rome, draw-
ing from engravings and casts, from sculpture,
and from the studio model. His compositional
sketches and finished sheets, most often in black
and white chalk, and particularly his academic
studies of the nude, are sought after for their
subtle virtuosity. In Rome he also drew idealized
and expressive heads. Seeking a livelihood in Paris
during a chaotic period when there were few if
any public commissions, he accepted commissions
from citizens for portraits that were relatively
modest in scale and ambition.
When he sat for this pastel, Nicolas Perchet
(or Perché) was a public official, juge au tribunal, in
the town of Gray. At forty, Perchet was Prud’hon’s
near contemporary, and in addition to being his
patron he may have been a personal friend, for he
stood as godfather to the artist’s son Pierre at the
child’s baptism on June 29, 1795. Prud’hon worked
in pastel infrequently. He was fortunate to have
found patrons in Franche-Comté, and for a year or
more while living there he painted their portraits.
This is a beautifully realized image in the man-
ner of the revolutionary period, when only the
most uncompromising closeup portraiture suited
the times. Perchet’s high neck cloth and coat collar
are typical. Because his head is brightly lit from
high above, his eye sockets and the hollow of his
cheek are in shadow. Prud’hon applied the lighter
blue and white chalks with great freedom. The
short, angular strokes he used to model the face
and the cropped hair on the top of the sitter’s head
give the portrait tension.

43
 Marie Gabrielle Capet
(French, Lyon 1761 – 1818 Paris)

32. Jean Pierre Demetz (1753 – 1821), 1800 – 1801

Pastel on paper, two sheets joined, laid down on canvas;
27¼ x 21½ in. (69.2 x 54.6 cm). Signed and dated at lower
left: M • G • Capet / An  • 9 • [1800 – 1801]. Private collection

Born in Lyon, Marie Gabrielle Capet was the

daughter of a domestic servant. She joined the
Paris atelier of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (see no. 27)
and showed a drawing at the Exposition de la
Jeunesse in Place Dauphine before her twentieth
birthday. In 1782 she exhibited two pastel portraits
there. Labille-Guiard saw it as her role to safe-
guard, train, and advance the interests of young
women artists, and Capet lived in her household
and became her most successful pupil. The young
painter presented a self-portrait in oils (now in
the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo) in
Place Dauphine in 1783, and in 1786 she sent two
portraits of officers to the Salon de la Correspon-
dance, where they were favorably reviewed. Another
of Madame Guiard’s students was Mademoiselle
Carreaux de Rosemond (died 1788), and she and
Capet appear with their teacher in a splendid self-
portrait (Metropolitan Museum) that was exhib-
ited at the Salon of 1785, doubtless promoting the
interests of all. Beginning in 1791, when the Salon
was opened to everyone, including women, by
decree of the Assemblée Nationale, Capet began
to exhibit portrait miniatures and later pastels
there, thus securing a steady flow of commissions
in difficult times. She continued to lodge with her
teacher and probably to work with her. She cared
for Labille-Guiard until her death in 1803. Capet
exhibited for the last time at the Salon in 1814, and
she herself died in 1818.
In 1800 – 1801, Year 9 of the Revolutionary Cal-
endar, Capet completed this pastel of a man who
seems to have been an engaging sitter: Jean Pierre
Demetz (1753 – 1821), an attorney in Dourdan, to
the north of Paris, who served twice as the town’s
mayor. A dozen years before, she had managed to
adapt her style, formed under the ancien régime,
to a more sober time. She used pastel for a number
same composition; meticulous blending was combined with discrete marks, for
of half-length portraits of men dating from 1797,
example, with each developed to varying degrees of finish. To render sculptural 1799, and 1801 that can be counted among her
and solid forms that showed no evidence of the artist’s hand, strokes of best works. This good-humored individual wears
a colorful waistcoat embroidered with triangles
closely related tones were juxtaposed and united by stumping, fusing shadows, and sprigs. His untidy old-fashioned wig has been
intermediary tones, and highlights into one another so that, as Bernard Lens powdered, and the powder lies on the shoulders
of his coat. There was perhaps some continuing
advised in his New and Compleat Drawing-Book, “there is no single Stroke.”  This connection between the artist and the sitter, as
is exemplified in the hat and mask in Carriera’s Gustavus Hamilton, the flawless the last oil Capet painted, in 1815, was of Madame
Demetz, his wife.
surfaces of Capet’s Jean Pierre Demetz, and the remarkably illusionistic marblelike
skin tones of Hamilton’s Antonio Canova (nos. 4, 32, 34), and in the seamless clarity
of pastels by Copley, Wright, Liotard, and Mengs. Such handling escalated in
popularity in the 1760s with the advent of Neoclassicism. Executed on ivory-
smooth surfaces, pastels like these evoke the precision of miniature painting, a
specialty of many of these artists, Carriera and Copley in particular. More
44
Thomas Gainsborough
(English, Sudbury 1727–1788 London)

33. Caroline, 4th Duchess of Marlborough

(1741–1811), ca. 1765–68
Pastel on green-brown paper, 12 5/8 x 9 5/8 in. (32.1 x
24.4 cm). Private collection

Born in 1727 the son of a Suffolk tradesman,

Thomas Gainsborough traveled in about 1740 to
London, where he may have trained with Grav-
elot, a French printmaker, as well as with the artist
and illustrator Hayman. In 1746 he married an
illegitimate daughter of the 3rd Duke of Beaufort.
Having tried and failed to support himself as a
landscape painter, he returned to his native Sud-
bury in 1749 to paint small single and group por-
traits. In 1752 he departed for Ipswich in search of
clients, but he achieved only limited success until
he settled in the spa town of Bath in 1758. He
began to paint fashionable full-length portraits,
which, as a founding member, he exhibited at the
Royal Academy of Arts from 1769 to 1784. Gains-
borough moved to London in 1774 and thereafter
received commissions from the royal family and
the cream of society and the arts. He devised
genre scenes called fancy pictures and was a gifted
landscape painter and draftsman, an occasional
printmaker, and an able musician. His letters indi-
cate that he was witty, gracious, and observant, but
also a man of moody and complex character.
Lady Caroline Russell was the only daughter
of John, 4th Duke of Bedford, and his second
wife, Gertrude. In 1762 Caroline married her
cousin George Spencer (1739–1817), 4th Duke of
Marlborough, who had succeeded his father in
1758 at the age of nineteen. Deeply attached to
each other, the couple had five daughters and
three sons, the eldest born in 1763 and the young-
est in 1785. This pastel must date to the 1760s,
when Gainsborough was living near Caroline’s
parents’ house in Bath, which she must have vis-
ited often. The Duke and Duchess of Bedford sat
for Gainsborough in the winter of 1764–65, and
the duke commissioned replicas of his portrait and
others at that time and in 1768–69. The Duchess
expressive effects were produced by interweaving neighboring strokes blended
of Marlborough seems never to have encountered
Gainsborough again, although she sat for Reynolds only with the pressure of the crayon so as to reveal the underlying hues between
on several occasions. them. This bolder facture, which asked viewers to blend the colors optically,
Of fewer than a half-dozen pastel portraits
widely accepted as Gainsborough’s, this is the appealed to the fashionable taste that desired to see signs of the maker’s hand in a
finest, and the only half-length. The young duchess work of art. Praised for their depth, variety, and illusion of transparency — all
sits in an upholstered chair in front of a billow-
ing curtain. On her curled and powdered hair she essential for a naturalistic and animated likeness — seemingly rapidly rendered
wears an ornament of jewels and feathers and a pastel portraits like Luti’s Study of a Boy in a Blue Jacket, Chardin’s Head of an Old
lace cap, and her blue and white striped silk dress
is trimmed with bows and quantities of lace. Man, Greuze’s Head of a Young Woman, Gainsborough’s Caroline, 4th Duchess of
The distinct individual strokes that describe her Marlborough, and Hamilton’s unfinished portrait of Canova (nos. 1, 12, 24, 33, 34)
clothes give way to her smooth, delicately mod-
eled face, with its slightly cleft chin. Despite the
were popular throughout the eighteenth century.
elaborate costume, her expression is wistful and The strongest and most spirited effects that could be achieved with crayons
she appears withdrawn, as if in a private world,
unobserved. Gainsborough may have intended
were tactile. Mixtures of scraped crayon powder and a wet vehicle were applied
this intimate portrait as a gift. (continued on page 51)

45
Hugh Douglas Hamilton
(Irish, Dublin 1740 – 1808 Dublin)

34. Antonio Canova (1757 – 1822), ca. 1790

Pastel over traces of graphite pencil, 10 x 81/8 in. (25.3 x
20.7 cm). Inscribed at lower right: CANOVA; in brown
ink on backing: By Hugh Douglas Hamilton Esq.
Portrait painter at Rome. Private collection, courtesy of
Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd, London

Hugh Douglas Hamilton is thought to have been

born in Dublin in 1740. Having trained under
Robert West (died 1770) at the Dublin Society’s
Drawing School, he won his first prize for draw-
ing in 1754. Not later than 1764 he moved to
London, where he showed at the Society of Arts
and by the end of the decade was well established
as a portraitist in pastels, working on a modest
scale and in an oval format for English and Irish
clients. George III and Queen Charlotte sat for
him for their portraits, and he exhibited regularly
at several venues before departing in about 1779
for Italy. Hamilton was abroad for twelve years.
By 1782 he was settled in Rome, where he found
success among the artists and archaeologists, deal-
ers, and distinguished patrons who formed his
circle of acquaintances. During his stay there he
also took up oil painting, and subsequent to his
return to Dublin in 1791 he specialized in portraits
in oils on a larger scale, taking sittings from many
of the most distinguished Irish citizens of the day.
While in Rome, Hamilton drew antique
sculpture and painted mythological subjects. He
shared his passion for antiquity with the leading
Neoclassical sculptor of the day, the Venetian-
born Antonio Canova, who had been established
in Rome since 1780. Canova, soon famous and
a most sympathetic personality, was painted by
several of his fellow artists. Hamilton made at the sculptor looks much the same, and that work Francis Cotes
least three portraits of the sculptor. In about 1787 must date to the same period. (English, London 1726 – 1770 London)
he received from Colonel John Campbell a com- Hamilton’s third portrait of Canova, arguably
mission for a group portrait in pastel of Henry the most brilliant, is this profile study of the 35. Lieutenant-Colonel the Honorable
Tresham (Campbell’s Irish agent) with Canova sculptor in formal dress partially inscribed in an Edmund Craggs Nugent (1731 – 1771), in
and a plaster of the sculptor’s Cupid and Psyche oval. The shadow falling over the bridge of his Van Dyck Costume, 1748
(which Campbell had also commissioned). A straight nose suggests the deep wells of his eyes, Pastel on blue paper, laid down on canvas; 23¼ x 17¼ in.
version of the pastel is in the Victoria and Albert and both the receding hairline and the slightly (59 x 43.7 cm). Signed and dated in yellow chalk at left:
Museum, London, and a later plaster variant of parted lips are characteristic. The portrait may FCotes px •t 1748 (FC in monogram). The Pierpont
the sculpture is in the Metropolitan Museum. If, have been deliberately left unfinished. Perhaps Morgan Library, New York, Purchased on the Edwin
as seems probable, Campbell and Tresham left Hamilton made it for himself as a memento and H. Herzog Fund, 2005 (2005.168)
together for England shortly thereafter, the group took it with him in 1791. Such a work would have
portrait or the studies for it must have been made required only a relatively short sitting, and if it
36. James Rivington Sr. (ca. 1724 – 1802), 1756
at that time. In Hamilton’s small pastel of Canova was commissioned it would have cost only a
in a red traveling coat (now in a private collection) modest sum. Pastel on gray paper, laid down on canvas; 24 x 177/8 in.
(61 x 45.4 cm). Signed and dated at lower right: FCotes
px •t  / 1756 (FC in monogram). New-York Historical
Society, Gift of Mrs. Augustus Van Horne Ellis
(1940.16)

Francis Cotes was the son of a London apothecary

and the brother of a miniaturist. He trained under
George Knapton (1698 – 1778), who had arrived
in Rome in 1725 and during a stay of seven years

46
in Italy evidently had fallen under the spell of identified as, and surely must be, Lieutenant- Society. James’s father, Charles, had been a Lon-
Rosalba Carriera’s pastels. Knapton began to work Colonel the Honorable Edmund Craggs Nugent don publisher and bookseller, specializing in the-
in pastel upon his return to the English capital, of the first regiment of Foot Guards. Nugent was ology, and James succeeded to ownership of the
and later the young Cotes learned from him and born in 1731 the only son of Robert Nugent, an firm. Later, abroad, he again went into the book
probably also from seeing pastels by Carriera Irishman who sat as a Member of Parliament for business, opening stores in Philadelphia and later
brought back by Grand Tourists (see, for example, forty years, held various government appoint- on New York’s Wall Street (1762), and in Boston
no. 4), for whom commissioning a portrait was as ments, and in 1776 was created Earl Nugent. (1765) as well. At first he was an ardent Tory, and
much a part of their travels as visiting the sights. Edmund’s mother died in childbirth in 1731, a his newspaper, Rivington’s New York Gazetteer, was
In 1747 Cotes was working skillfully with these year after her marriage, and Robert was twice a vehicle for his attacks on nascent revolutionary
increasingly popular but somewhat intransigent remarried to wealthy widows. Little is known sentiment. By 1781, however, he had taken up the
materials. Within a few years he was attracting of Lieutenant-Colonel Nugent beyond the fact American cause.
important sitters and selling prints after the pastel that he had two sons, one of whom became an As Rivington’s portrait is dated 1756, the com-
portraits he had made of them. Cotes was using ambassador and the other an admiral. His alleged mission may have coincided with his assump-
oils as well by 1753, and in due course these out- marriage to a Miss Dorothy Vernon in 1755 was tion of responsibility for the family business in
numbered his pastels. He exhibited works in both set aside after he died in Bath in 1771, leaving London. His stance is upright and his alert gaze
media at the Society of Artists from 1760 until his sons illegitimate, but they inherited their is fixed on the viewer. His high, pale forehead,
1768. He was among four petitioners who in 1768 grandfather’s fortune. Nugent was portrayed by long nose, and rather full mouth are modeled
brought to George III the proposal to establish Johan Zoffany as a boy in a family portrait and by with attention to detail, and the skin tones and
a Royal Academy of Arts, and he also numbered Thomas Gainsborough as an officer in uniform at slight beard are carefully painted. Cotes was a
among the first exhibitors there, showing eighteen full-length. Here he is depicted as a young man good draftsman, and his contours (the negative
portraits in the first two years. Cotes was compet- of seventeen with unfashionably long ash-blond shape formed by the outline of the figure against
ing with Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsbor- hair wearing a Van Dyck costume in a wonderful the background field) are always interesting. The
ough when, in 1770, at the height of his fame, he combination of pale lavender and gold. Lace col- sonorous blue of the sitter’s coat does not draw
took a medicine intended to cure him of kidney or lars and coats with slashed sleeves in the style of attention away from his lively face, even though
gall stones that instead resulted in his early death. Van Dyck were a popular form of fancy dress in the artist gave his usual attention to the detailing
His work, much of which is still in private hands, the eighteenth century. of the highlights on the braid and buttons. Rather
is perhaps not as much appreciated as it should be. When James Rivington Sr. left England for typically for Cotes, the lapels of the coat are nei-
Several years ago the Morgan Library acquired America in 1760 he carried with him his portrait ther buttoned down nor folded back but instead
a fine early Cotes that according to its sale record by Cotes. The pastel passed by direct descent form angular accents. The two pastels form an
represented a Colonel Nugent. The sitter has been through his daughter to the New-York Historical interesting contrast in style and type.

47
 between 1768 and 1771 and while there completed
two views of A Blacksmith’s Shop (one is at the Yale
Center for British Art, New Haven) depicting
laborers working by firelight. From 1773 to 1775 he
traveled in Italy, immersing himself in the study of
nature, and upon his return to England he settled
for two years in Bath to spend as much time as
possible painting landscapes. From 1778 he exhib-
ited work in a variety of genres at the Royal Acad-
emy, and he held a major one-man show in
London in 1785.
The Metropolitan Museum recently acquired
this pastel representing a near lifesize head of a
young woman in grisaille that is one of fewer than
a dozen of its type by Wright of Derby. None of
the grisailles are dated, but most are assigned to
shortly before 1770, when Wright was in Liver­
pool. The pastel may have been studied from
someone Wright knew rather than from a model,
but it would nevertheless have been understood
as an exercise in exploring expression, a concept
characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment. Study
heads were a popular subgenre in Holland and
later in France and Italy; prints after drawings
by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682 – 1754) circu-
lated widely, for example, and are known to have
been among Wright’s sources of inspiration. He
must also have been familiar with a series of fine
prints by the mezzotint engraver Thomas Frye
(ca. 1710 – 1762) that were announced in 1760. To
enhance the sense of the sitter’s physical pres-
ence, Wright brought her as close as possible to
the imagined opening provided by the frame. The
play of light and shade on her face and neck and
the variations in the tone of her hair are minutely
examined in delicate shades of black, white, and
gray. The disciplined handling constitutes a tour
de force, especially as pastels were most often
valued not for their tonal qualities but for the
intensity and variety of their hues.
A Boy Reading, a remarkable study of stillness
and absorption, approaches much more closely
a genre painting and is unique among Wright’s
grisaille pastels in showing the figure at nearly
Joseph Wright Joseph Wright, the son of an attorney in Derby, half-length, his hand resting on a book that lies
(English, Derby 1734 – 1797 Derby) trained in London with a leading portraitist, open on a table or bench before him. The boy is
Thomas Hudson (ca. 1701 – 1779), from 1751 to 1753 formally dressed in a coat, a waistcoat, and a shirt
37. Study Head of a Woman, ca. 1770 and again in 1756 – 57. Having established a client with a ruffle that is open at the neck. His head
Grisaillle pastel on blue laid paper, 157/8 x 11 in. (40.3 x base as a portraitist, in the early 1760s Wright and shoulders entirely fill the frame, as if he is
28 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers turned his attention to what might be called mod- wedged tightly into a narrow space. He looks to
Fund, 2007 (2007. 40) ern genre subjects and began to employ increas- be perhaps ten years old and is most seriously
ingly dramatic effects of light. In this he was engaged upon his labors. The artist drew the pen-
apparently influenced by seventeenth-century etration of the light around the contours, skill-
Caravaggesque painting. His first exhibit at the fully describing the boy’s skin and the smoothly
38. A Boy Reading, ca. 1766 Society of Artists in London, in 1765, was an rounded ovoid shape of his head. This sheet may
Grisaille pastel on blue laid paper, 16½ x 11 in. (42 x innovative painting in this new mode titled Three be related to Wright’s early exploration of light
28 cm). Private collection, courtesy of Jean-Luc Baroni Persons Viewing the “Gladiator” by Candlelight (pri- effects in genre subject pictures. If so, it could be
Ltd, London vate collection). Wright lived mostly in Liverpool among the earliest of his grisailles.

48
49
Daniel Gardner dated his work, and was secretive about his meth- here must be John, who would form an important
(English, Kendal ca. 1750 – 1805 London) ods. His oil paintings are few in number, but he collection of old master and early nineteenth-
had many clients for small whole-length portraits century paintings, among them the Museum’s
39. Lady Rushout with Her Three Elder of individuals and family groups expertly and Vivarini altarpiece of the Death of the Virgin,
Children, Anne, Harriet, and John, ​ fluidly painted in pastel and gouache. He worked which was then attributed to Giotto. Based on the
ca. 1773 – 75 rapidly and apparently traveled about the country- boy’s age, the picture can be dated between 1773
Pastel and gouache on paper, laid down on canvas; side staying with clients and taking sittings from and 1775, or very early in Gardner’s career. While
26 x 33 in. (66 x 83.8 cm). Private collection various members of their families. For the most the artist’s handling of his materials is accom-
part he preferred the relatively small scale seen plished, he was relatively inexperienced in matters
here in the single-figure study of Lady Williams- of iconography: the way Lady Rushout points to
Born in Kendal, Westmoreland, Daniel Gardner Wynn. Although Gardner is reported to have her son with her index finger and displays a bunch
attended grammar school and received drawing been proud and antisocial, he is also known to of grapes, symbolizing fertility, certainly lacks
lessons from George Romney (1734 – 1802). He have numbered the young John Constable among subtlety. The portrait descended in the family and
moved to London late in the 1760s and in 1770 his personal friends. Gardner died in London of among friends and until recently had been known
entered the Royal Academy schools. There he liver disease. only from an engraving. Pastel is a durable mate-
probably studied with Benjamin West (1738– 1820) Rebecca Bowles, pictured in this family por- rial if sheltered from natural light, and this work,
and Johan Zoffany (1733 – 1810), among others, and trait, was married in 1766 to John Rushout, who with its fine handling and coloring, probably looks
he was awarded a silver medal for an academy succeeded as 5th Baronet in 1775 and in 1797 was much as it did when it was painted. It retains its
figure, a study from the nude male model. In the created Baron Northwick of Northwick Park, beautiful original frame.
hope of receiving further instruction he joined the Worcestershire. Like generations of his family he Judging by this portrait of Charlotte, Lady
studio of Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792), whom he served as a Member of Parliament for Evesham. Williams-Wynn, Gardner must have had a good
always thereafter greatly admired, as an assistant. The couple’s daughters Anne and Harriet were sort of clientele. Lady Williams-Wynn was the
How Gardner came to be trained in the use of followed by a son, also John, who was born in 1770 daughter of the Honorable George Grenville. In
pastel and gouache is not known; he did not par- and died unmarried in 1859. Given the blue sash 1771 she became the second wife of Sir Watkin
ticipate in public exhibitions, never signed or and the prominent role he plays, the central figure Williams-Wynn, of Wynnstay, County Denbigh,

50
Daniel Gardner
40. Lady Williams-Wynn (Charlotte
Grenville, died 1832), ca. 1775
Pastel, black chalk, and gouache, highlighted with
body color, on white laid paper; 11 x 8¾ in. (27.9 x
22.2 cm). Inscribed on label on backing: Lady Williams
Wynn  / by D. Gardner; Lady Watkins William Wynn  / M
1771 daughter of  / The Rt. Honble George Grenville. Private
collection

4th Baronet and owner of extensive estates in with a brush both during the working process and as final touches to create
Shropshire and Wales. Her portrait must date
from the couple’s early years together. Gardner thick, irregular, and light-capturing details such as the smooth dark watercolor
also painted Sir Watkin, probably at the same voids in the magnificent lace in Coypel’s double portrait, the fluid coin necklace
time, but the two portraits have been separated
for a century or more and the location of his is
in Liotard’s Young Woman in Turkish Costume, the brilliant impasted passemen­‑
unknown. Sir Watkin also commissioned a por- ​terie in La Tour’s Jean Charles Garnier d’Isle, the thick passages of gouache sur-
trait of himself from Pompeo Batoni and one of
Charlotte with three of their children from Joshua
rounding the stumped flesh tones in Gardner’s Lady Rushout with Her Three
Reynolds (both now belong to the National Mu- Elder Children, and the dashes of texture in the fabrics in Russell’s John Collins of
seum of Wales, Cardiff ). An amateur with a large
Devizes (frontispiece, back cover, and nos.  5, 17, 39, 43). The gouachelike paint
fortune, Sir Watkin may have been the most im-
portant Welsh patron of the arts in the eighteenth produced an optically unified and aesthetically harmonious effect, and such
century, with interests encompassing music, the- details brought the imaginary to life, provoking an interplay between the visual
ater, architecture, and gardening. He would have
been a much sought after patron. Here his young and the tangible. More commonly, tactile or contrasting effects were achieved
wife wears (and displays) a bracelet comprised of with dry crayon by varying the pressure of application. The highlighted earring
seven strands of pearls, rather like one favored by
Queen Charlotte. Lady Williams-Wynn’s dress is in Wright’s Study Head of a Woman (no. 37), for example, is a tapering, solid mark
a wrapping gown, and her coat is trimmed with firmly impressed with the tip of a broken crayon, and the palpable lace trim in
fur in a style that had been much favored by
Reynolds a decade earlier. Gardner was techni- the cap in Russell’s Mrs. Robert Shurlock (no.  44) was rendered with a barely
cally wonderfully adept, and the work is in a per- moistened soft crayon dragged over the surface, as was the dense, spirited net-
fect state of preservation.
work of colored strokes in Chardin’s Head of an Old Man (no. 12). Such varied

51
John Russell The son of a seller of books and prints, John Rus- Sarah Godschall, an only child, had inherited the
(English, Guildford 1745 – 1806 Hull) sell was born in 1745 in Guildford, Surrey, where old manor house and property from her father,
he attended the local grammar school. He served Nicholas, and his older brother, Sir Robert, a
41. William Man Godschall (1720 – 1802), 1791 an apprenticeship with Francis Cotes (see nos. 35 former Lord Mayor of London. William took
Pastel on paper, laid down on canvas; 23¾ x 17¾ in. and 36) in London before setting up his own stu- Sarah’s name when they married. Man God-
(60.3 x 45.1 cm). Signed and dated right of center: dio there in 1768. He then entered the Royal schall held a Doctor of Laws degree and was a
J Russell RA. Pinx •t  / 1791. The Metropolitan Museum Academy schools, and from 1769 until his death member of various learned societies. His income
of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Wiesenberger, he exhibited annually, becoming an associate derived from dairy farming. With his bright eyes
1961 (61.182.1) member in 1772 and a full member in 1788. He and dark brows, he looks younger here than his
showed a total of 332 pastels at the Academy. Rus- seventy-one years. His coat collar and black hair
sell was crayon painter—as a pastelist was then ribbon are covered with a quantity of fresh pow-
42. Mrs. William Man Godschall (1730 – 1795),
called—to both King George III and the Prince der from his wig. His formidable wife wears her
1791
of Wales, later George IV. He specialized in por- hair dressed wide in the fashionable style of the
Pastel on paper, laid down on canvas; 23¾ x 17¾ in. traits and so-called fancy pictures, a sort of combi- moment. The crinkled and ruffled fabric of her
(60.3 x 45.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, nation of real life scenes and disguised portraiture, elaborate cap and shawl frame her carefully mod-
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Wiesenberger, 1961 often involving children and sometimes animals. eled face. She occupies a disproportionately large
(61.182.2) As the author of Elements of Painting with Crayons, part of the picture surface by comparison with
published in 1772 and the most important instruc- her husband, and it is possible to imagine that
43. John Collins of Devizes, 1799 tional text of its kind, he is even now considered she was deliberately presenting herself to Russell
an authoritative voice on the materials and tech- as the heiress that she was.
Pastel on paper, 30 x 25¼ in. (76.2 x 64.1 cm). Signed niques of pastel. Until 2002 Russell was the only Among Russell’s exhibits at the Royal Academy
and dated in red crayon at lower right: J. Russell major eighteenth-century pastelist (except Jean in 1799 was this portrait of John Collins of Devizes,
RA  / pinxit 1799. Yale Center for British Art, New Baptiste Pillement, who did not do portraits) in Wiltshire. Wiltshire is sheep country and Col-
Haven, Paul Mellon Collection (B1977.14.6261) represented in the Metropolitan Museum’s per- lins, who was in the wool trade, is shown leaning
manent collection. on a fencepost with a splendid ram beside him.
According to labels from the reverse of each It can be assumed that he was honestly portrayed,
of these two portraits, Mr. and Mrs. Man God- for his forehead is lined, his cheek and hand are
schall sat for Russell in the year of their fortieth quite heavily veined, and he is nearly bald, with
anniversary. Their portraits were installed in the what hair he has already gray. According to one
dining room of Weston House, at Albury, Surrey. local historian, Collins was an antiquary. Many

52
53
 John Russell
44. Mrs. Robert Shurlock (1775 – 1849) and Her
Daughter Ann, 1801
Pastel on paper, laid down on canvas, 237/8 x 17¾ in.
(60.6 x 45.1 cm). Signed and dated in red chalk at upper
right: J Russell R.A. pt.  / 1801. The Metropolitan Museum
of Art, Gift of Geoffrey Shurlock, 1967 (67.132)

people in the area were dissenters and evidently he

was a Baptist, as he left his library to the Baptist
Chapel in Broughton, Hampshire, not far away,
where this portrait was hanging in the manse in
1894. John Collins either did not commission or
did not accept this picture, because it was in Rus-
sell’s 1807 estate sale. Russell’s direct and relatively
informal presentation of the sitter would have
been somewhat outside the norm for the time.
The darker contours, especially, are softened and
blurred by the failing evening light.
Russell’s eldest surviving child and his first
granddaughter are represented in his portrait
of Mrs. Robert Shurlock, elegantly dressed in
white, with her first baby, Ann, wearing a lace
cap. Henrietta Russell probably married Robert
Shurlock of Chertsey, near Guildford, Surrey, in
1800, when he would have been twenty-one and
she several years older. Apparently she sat for her
portrait at this time; an inscription on a label on
the reverse records that the child was added later
(which explains why the mother’s right forearm is
so long). This pastel, dated 1801, is among several
Shurlock portraits that remained in the family
until they were presented to the Museum in 1967
and 1975.

effects not only served to distinguish the technical prowess of the artist but were
enjoyed for their novelty and the illusion they conveyed, and they invited the
close scrutiny that so delighted eighteenth-century viewers.
The enthusiasm for pastel began to wane in the 1760s and 1770s. It was criti-
cized for its mealy dustiness, and its bright colors were no longer praised but
instead were associated with the frivolity of the ancien régime. Anti-Rococo
sentiment increasingly attacked the feminization of society and, by association,
pastel and its inherent artifice. A more chaste classical taste came into vogue, and
it demanded sobriety in color and decor. Though pastel was never entirely aban-
doned, it rapidly became a secondary medium practiced by minor artists or used
only for color studies. By the late 1790s watercolor and conté crayon were being
promoted by the art and philosophical societies, and pastel had become “a style
now quite unfashionable.” Not until the 1870s would the medium be reintro-
duced in its full glory by the Impressionists. And though the aesthetic, tech-
nique, and many of the materials of pastel were transformed, enthusiasm for its
brilliant, diffuse light nonetheless endured.

54
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Sources of Quotations

Page 5: La Font de Saint-Yenne 1747, pp. 118–19, Dossie 1768–82, vol. 1, pp. 229–30; C. A. de Lieudé ition des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture etc.,
quoted in Jeffares 2006, p. 643. Page 11: George de Sepmanville, Réflexions nouvelles d’un amateur de l’année 1747,” quoted in Jeffares 2006, p. 644.
Vertue, Vertue Note Books, vol. 3, Walpole Society des beaux-arts (Paris, 1747), quoted in Hoisington Page 34: Russell 1777, pp. 18–19. Page 37: Piles
22 (Oxford, 1934), p. 109; Piles 1684, p. 91. Page 2006, pp. 161–62; Chaperon 1788, p. 23. Page 27: 1743, p. 158. Page 39: Abbé Pierre François Guyot-
12: Francis Cotes, “Notes on Crayon Painting,” John Goodman, ed. and trans., Diderot on Art Desfontaines, Observations sur les écrits modernes
European Magazine, February 1797, pp. 84, 85. (New Haven, 1995), vol. 2, p. 86. Page 30: quoted 14 (1738), letter 208, p. 306. Page 43: Russell 1777,
Page 15: Chaperon 1788, p. 42, no. 46. Page 20: in Andrew McClellan, “The Politics and Aesthet- p. 27. Page 44: Lens 1766, p. 3. Page 54: Richard
Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and ics of Display: Museums in Paris 1750–1800,” Art Colt Hoare, The History of Modern Wiltshire, vol. 1​
Henry Pelham, 1739–1776 (Boston: Massachusetts History 7, no. 1 (December 1984), p. 451. Page 31: (London, 1822), p. 73. Unless other­wise attributed,
Historical Society, 1914), p. 26; Dossie 1764, p. 196; Abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc, “Lettre sur l’expos­ translations are by the author.

56
The Metropolitan
Museum of Art
Bulletin
Spring 2011