Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Maurice Quentin de la Tour

TOUR, Maurice Quentin de la (1704-1788), the renowned pastellist, was born at St Quentin on the 5th September 1704. On leaving Picardy for Paris he entered the studio of an artist named Du Pouche, and then that of Spoède,—an upright man, but a poor master, rector of the Academy of St Luke, who still continued, in the teeth of the Royal Academy, the traditions of the old guild of the master-painters of Paris. This possibly contributed to the adoption by De la Tour of a line of work foreign to that imposed by an academical training; for pastels, though occasionally used, were not a principal and distinct branch of work until 1720, when Rosalba Camera brought them into fashion with the Parisian world. In 1737 De la Tour exhibited the first of that splendid series of a hundred and fifty portraits which formed the glory of the Salon for the succeeding thirty-seven years. In 1746 he was received by the Academy; and in 1751, the following year to that in which he received the title of painter to the king, he was promoted by that body to the grade of councillor. His work had the rare merit to satisfy at once both the taste of his fashionable models and the judgment of his brother artists. His art, consummate of its kind, achieved the task of flattering his sitters, whilst hiding that flattery behind the just and striking likeness which, says Mariette, he hardly ever missed. His portraits of Rousseau, of Voltaire, of Louis XV., of his queen, of the dauphin and dauphiness, are at once documents and masterpieces un surpassed except by his life-size portrait of Madame de Pompadour, which, exhibited at the Salon of 1755, is still the chief ornament of the cabinet of pastels in the Louvre. It is and will probably always be the most perfect model of this class of work as long as time and damp spare the fragile dust to which it owes its beauty. The museum of St Quentin, however, also possesses a magnificent collection of works which at his death were in his own hands. De la Tour retired to St Quentin at the age of 80, and there he died on 17th February 1788. The riches amassed during his long life were freely bestowed by him in great part before his death; he founded prizes at the school of fine arts in Paris and for the town of Amiens, and endowed St Quentin with a great number of useful and charitable institutions. He never married, but lived on terms of warm affection with his brother (who survived him, and left to the town the drawings now in the museum); and his relations to Mdlle. Fel, the celebrated singer, were distinguished by a strength and depth of feeling not common to the loves of the 18th century.

See, in addition to the general works on French art, Desmaze, three works, of which the most important is Le Reliquaire de la Tour; Guiffrey and Tourneux, Correspondance Inedite de M. Q de la Tour; Champfleury, De la Tour, and Peintres de Loon et de St Quentin; and Dreolle de Nodon, Eloge Biographique de M. Q. de la Tour.