Your Eyes to the World of Soft Pastel Art
Old Pastel Masters
Old Pastel Master: Jean-Baptiste Perronneau
Mar 10th
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau pastel works
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1715-1783) was a French painter who specialized in portraits executed in pastels.
Perronneau began his career as an engraver, apparently studying with Laurent Cars, whose portrait he drew, and working for the entrepreneurial printseller Gabriel Huquier, making his first portraits in oils, and especially in pastels, in the 1740s. His career was much in the shadow of the master of the French pastel portrait, Maurice Quentin de La Tour. This led him to seek a clientele outside Paris, especially it seems in Orléans, but also in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon and in Turin, Rome and Amsterdam. Less popular with the high aristocracy than La Tour, he painted mostly the senior Officials, and the upper bourgeoisie, engineers, doctors and clergy. On the other hand he seems to have been particularly favoured and respected by his own colleagues.
In the Salon of 1750, Perronneau exhibited his pastel portrait of Maurice-Quentin de la Tour, but found to his dismay that La Tour was exhibiting his own self portrait, perhaps a malicious confrontation to demonstrate his superiority in pastel technique.
Perronneau was born in Paris but died unknown in Amsterdam at age 68.
Old Pastel Master: Maurice Quentin de la Tour
Feb 28th
Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788) was a French Rococo portraitist who worked primarily with pastels. Among his most famous subjects were Voltaire, Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. He was the son of a musician who disapproved of his painting career. That’s why he has as teenager left home and went to Paris where he was thought to paint. He went to Rheims in 1724 and to England in 1725, returning to Paris to resume his studies around 1727. In Paris he also had learned about new medium “pastel” made so popular by a young Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera. After returning to Paris, he adopted pastel as the sole medium of his portraits.
In 1737 La Tour exhibited the first of a splendid series of 150 portraits that served as one of the glories of the Paris Salon for the next 37 years. In the age of 46 he was appointed portraitist to the King, which established his reputation among the royalty and upper middle class.
There is an interesting story about his character and attitude: While painting Madame de Pompadour (click on the link to hear interesting story about this painting) he ask not to be disturbed but: “A quarter of an hour had scarcely passed when the door of the apartment opened and the King entered. Lifting his cap, La Tour said to his model, “You promised, Madame, that your door should be closed to visitors.” Louis laughed good at both the costume and the rebuke of the artist, and begged him to proceed with his work. “It is impossible for me to obey your Majesty,” replied La Tour: “I will return when Madame is alone.” There-upon he walked into another room to dress himself, saying as he went, “I don’t like to be interrupted.”
Towards the end of his life, he founded an art school and became a philanthropist before begin confined to his home because of mental illness. He retired at the age of 80 to Saint-Quentin where now stands the Musee Antoine Lecuyer with it’s wonderful collection of close to 80 works by this master of pastel
There is an interesting interactive tour of his work on interactive pages of the Museum “Antoine Lecuyer”.
Old Pastel Master: Jean-Etienne Liotard
Feb 20th
Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789) was born in Geneve, Switzerland, where he was trained as a miniature painter. In his twenties he sought his fortune in Paris, where he studied in a prominent painter’s studio. After rejection by the Académie Royale, he traveled to Italy, where he obtained numerous portrait commissions.
Liotard next embarked on a journey throughout the Mediterranean region and finally settled in Constantinople for four years. Intrigued by the native dress, he grew a long beard and acquired the habit of dressing as a Turk, earning himself the nickname of “the Turkish painter”. For the rest of his life, Liotard traveled throughout Europe painting portraits in pastels. In Rome 1735 he painted portraits of Pope Clement XII and several cardinals. He traveled to Vienna in 1743 to paint the portraits of Empress Maria Theresa and her family, visited England from 1753 to 1755 and painted portraits of the Princess of Wales and other notables.
His painting style intimately captured a tender and realistic representation of his subjects. Later settling in his birthplace of Geneva, he wrote “Treatise on the Art of Painting”, in which he claimed painting ought to be a mirror of nature. This strong belief is seen prominently in his portraits, but also in still-life works and landscapes he painted later in life.
resources:
youtube
Wikipedia
Museums:
Musées d’art et d’histoire, Geneva
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden
Old Pastel Master: Rosalba Carriera
Feb 14th
Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757) was one of the most successful women artists of any era. The Venetian-born Rosalba Carriera spent most of her long life fulfilling commissions for distinguished patrons at courts across 18th-century Europe. Rosalba developed an innovative approach to the medium of pastel for which she is best known today. Carriera’s greatest patron was Augustus III of Poland, who sat for her in 1713 and eventually amassed a collection of more than 150 pastels by the artist, which are currently part of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie in Germany.
Rosalba Carriera is credited with having greatly popularized the medium of pastels in France during the early 1700s; and with introducing, perhaps even instructing, the renowned French pastel artist, Maurice Quentin de la Tour, to the use of pastels as a portrait medium. Tragically, perhaps as a result of years spent straining to paint miniature portraits, her eyesight failed her the last ten years of her life. She died in 1757 at the age of 81. Along with her long-time friend, Antoine Watteau, whom she also portrayed in pastels. The two of them were considered the leading French portrait artists of the Rococo era.
www resources:
Web Gallery of Art
Wikipedia
Some museums and art galleries:
Dresden Gemäldegalerie
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
Barbara Benedetti Newton
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