Maurice-Quentin de la Tour, the laughing author

Maurice-Quentin de la Tour (1704-1788), Self-portrait pointing
Private collection

(extracts from an article on pileface)

Who was Maurice-Quentin de la Tour? Louis Fourcaud, in 1908, described him as a "reprimander" (morigéneur); Diderot in his Salons of 1763 and 1767, as "an odd man, but a good man", "an honest and true man." He is said to have dabbled in poetry, politics, metaphysics and theology, and even in astronomy. In a letter of 1753, Miss Prevost called him an ardent champion of Italian music (like Rousseau). He is said to have have learned Latin at age fifty-five (Diderot, Salon of 1769). He described himself, in a letter of 1770, as "always busy with all kinds of achievements, and consequently with the happiness of mankind," ready to "forget himself like an atom in the space of the universe" but convinced that the desire for immortality is "inside ourselves, united with the love of truth, justice and charity", and a believer in divine providence.

The Antoine-Lecuyer Museum in St Quentin:

La Tour by the Goncourt brothers:

"... La Tour painted his portraits in pastel. The irritability of his nerves, the delicacy of his health forced him to abandon the practice of oil painting. By focusing on this kind of painting with coloured pencils, where he found his genius, he followed his times. He conformed to this fashion that seemed to revive and renew in France during the eighteenth century the French taste for pencil drawing in the sixteenth. And who knows whether he was influenced in his vocation by the sojourn in Paris of la Rosalba in 1720 and in 1721? La Tour was able to witness this triumph of pastel, this fortune in pencil by the Venetian, who was visited by the Regent, sought out by the great and the good, snowed under with commissions and money, sollicited, begged for a portrait by Parabère and the de Pries, the greatest ladies of the court, taken with the charm of her art, which gave women an indescribably light vapourous life, a breath of likeness in floral colours. However it was, La Tour soon benefited from the craze for pastels created by la Rosalba. "He took little time with his portraits," said Mariette, "not tiring out his models at all; he made good likenesses, he was cheap. His press was good. He became the commonplace painter."

Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757), Portrait of Antoine Watteau
Museo Civico Luigi Bailo, Treviso

About this time, some portraits he had made for the Boullongne family were noticed by Louis de Boulogne, the principal painter to the King, who discovered in them, behind their casual execution, the innate gift that makes verisimilitude natural to the hand of a portraitist; he wanted to see La Tour; he encouraged him, promising him a future if he wished to work. And was it not the voice of Boulogne, amid the unanimous praise given to a finished portrait of the young painter, who gave him this stern advice: "Draw, young man, keep on drawing"? Grand words that saved La Tour from the trade. Renouncing profit and easy success, he did not paint for two years, withdrew and immersed himself in the study of drawing; and from these two years spent in searching, and the years of effort that followed, advised and guided by the friendship of Largillière and Restout, emerged the great draughtsman, the greatest, strongest and most profound of the entire French school, the draughtsman-physiognomist; he emerged a brand new pastellist, acceding to power, to strength, to all the energy of expression, with his tender and caressing pencils, intended only, it seems, to express the pulp of the fruit, the smoothness of the skin, the "featheriness" of the clothing of his time; he emerged a creator in pastel, who, in this feminine art addressed to women, in the drawings of la Rosalba, in this painting of floating coquetry, half-fixed, volatile, like the powder of grace, draws out and erects a male art, expansive and serious, a painting of such intensity of expression, such contours and such an illusion of life, that his painting manages to threaten, to disturb all the other painting, and for a time the doors of the Academy closed in fear of the art of the Master."

- Jules and Edmond Goncourt, La Tour

La Tour, Study for Portrait of Voltaire
Musée Antoine-Lecuyer, St Quentin

"La Tour had not yet been accepted by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and consequently had not even had any works exhibited at the Salon, when he was approached by Voltaire in 1735 to paint his portrait. This particularly prestigious commission, given the renown of the sitter, constituted an extraordinary opportunity to promote his name, and he seized it masterfully. As he reveals in his correspondence, Voltaire first posed for the artist in April of that year. It seems that the pastellist first made at least two preparatory pastels, of which one subsequently belonged to Emile then Jules Strauss, and is now kept in the National Museum in Stockholm, and the other acquired by the Antoine Lecuyer Museum in 1995. In the first, the face of the author of The Henriade and Zaire is drawn facing the viewer, venturing a smile that makes him purse his lips, and fills his eyes with malice. In the second, the philosopher is drawn in three-quarter view, slightly turned to the right. It is this more dynamic pose that was finally chosen.

Now lost, the final work was a half-length portrait to the waist, the torso facing right, holding a book in his left hand, his face challenging his admirer. Even before receiving this portrait, in April 1736 Voltaire asked his friend the Abbé Moussinot to make two fair copies. The first was to be executed with great care in order to serve as a prototype for all those that would be painted subsequently. To this end, Voltaire had hoped it would be retouched by La Tour himself and that it would serve primarily as a model for a miniature to be mounted in a ring. These are now various copies, such as the one painted in pastel kept at the Château de Ferney and the one painted in oil belonging to the Antoine Lecuyer Museum, which, according to tradition, was given by Voltaire to Madame de Champbonin in 1737, or the engravings that were made at the end of 1735, which enable us to know the original composition. When the autograph pastel by La Tour reached Cirey in November 1736, it did not have the desired effect on its commissioner. Indeed, on 17th November Voltaire wrote to the Abbé Moussinot that he would have preferred it "a little denser and with more vivid colours." Covered in white and lightly embellished with pink, the study in the museum in St Quentin had certainly been scrupulously reproduced in the final work, to the point of rather disappointing the artist's first famous patron."

- Xavier Salmon, Le voleur d'âmes, Maurice Quentin La Tour, Artlys, Versailles, 2004.

Portraits by La Tour - Slideshow:


Antoine Lecuyer Museum website
Works by La Tour at the Louvre Museum

Cleopatra - Natalie Dessay sings Handel

Handel: Cleopatra
Arias from Giulio Cesare
Natalie Dessay (soprano)
with Sonia Prina (alto)
Le Concert d’Astrée
directed by Emmanuelle Haïm

Label: Virgin Classics
Release date: 10th Jan 2011

Track listing:
Overture from Giulio Cesare
Tutto puo` donna vezzosa
V' adoro, pupille
Venere bella
Vuo dar vita
Piangerò la sorte mia
Troppo crudeli siete
Se pietà di me non senti
Da tempeste il legno infranto
Caro! Bella! Più amabile beltà

At the Paris Opéra in early 2011, Natalie Dessay will take on a new starring role: Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, now the most popular of all the composer’s stage works. The many facets of the Egyptian queen – captured by Shakespeare in the phrase “infinite variety” – are depicted in a sequence of contrasting arias, both lyrical and brilliant, making the character a superb showcase for the French soprano’s talents as a singing actress.

Promotional video for Cleopatra from Virgin Classics:


Conducting the impressive cast and the period-instrument orchestra Le Concert d'Astrée at the Opéra – and on this new recording of excerpts from Giulio Cesare – is Emmanuelle Haïm, who first collaborated with Dessay in the late 1990s; both artists were involved in a Paris production of Handel’s Alcina, Haïm as répétiteur (for William Christie) and Dessay in the sparkling role of Morgana. Since then, the two have developed a close working relationship which has produced a number of Virgin Classics recordings, including several works by Handel: cantatas (in a collection called Delirio), the Dixit Dominus and the oratorio Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, a recording which left the French magazine Diapason “looking forward to Emmanuelle Haïm’s next exciting Handelian adventure”.

Dessay describes Haïm as the metteur en scène – the stage director – for her voice, while Haïm describes Dessay’s voice as “an exceptional instrument which can take on a thousand forms ... Its virtuosity and flexibility make you forget all the difficulties presented by the music.” Haïm goes on to say that: “Handel is the composer for the voice. He demands special qualities that Natalie possesses: an ability to create colours, to embody words in song and to let the imagination speak.”

Promotional video for Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, released by Virgin Classics in 2007:

Reviewing Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno, Le Monde de la Musique observed that “the virtuosity and rich palette of Le Concert d’Astrée enable Emanuelle Haïm to match the colours and tempo to the emotion expressed”, while the New York Times wrote that: “Ms. Haïm directs the superb Baroque orchestra Le Concert d'Astrée in a fleet, immaculate performance that dances among airy, profound and sensuous moods. The excellent quartet of singers is led by the radiant, bright voice of the soprano Natalie Dessay, whose rapturous Bellezza traverses innocence, defiance and penitence by way of some impressively agile coloratura. Tu del ciel ministro eletto, her spare, haunting final aria with plaintive violin accompaniment, is glorious.” In Britain, the The Sunday Times found that “Natalie Dessay dazzles in Beauty’s arias – she is gorgeous in the sublime penitential concluding number … With Haïm conducting with élan, this is the best available version of this glorious score.”

Promotional video for Bach Cantatas, released by Virgin Classics in 2009:


Outstanding soprano Natalie Dessay and conductor Emmanuelle Haïm have come to a great understanding with their numerous Handel recordings, especially Delirio (Handel Cantatas), which sealed their musical companionship and paved the way for numerous recording projects on Virgin Classics. After their recent recording of Bach’s Magnificat and Handel’s Dixit Dominus, Natalie Dessay and Emmanuelle Haïm present their first all-Bach recital.

The programme features three of Bach’s superb Cantatas, including the great Ich habe genug, in Bach’s own arrangement for soprano, BWV 82a. The other two Cantatas are two of only four sacred cantatas that Bach wrote for solo soprano: Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen (Praise God in All Lands) is one of Bach's best known cantatas, with an important part for solo trumpet, here performed by young British musician Neil Brough. Both the soprano part, which calls for a high C in the first and last movements, and the solo trumpet part, which at times trades melodic lines with the soprano on an equal basis, are extremely virtuosic. The third cantata Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut (My Heart Swims in Blood) is one of the earliest cantatas Bach composed – its vocal part is technically demanding and contains challenges which Natalie Dessay meets with the highest artistry.

A complete performance of Se pietà di me non senti from Giulio Cesare:


For comparison, here are two alternative versions of this aria, sung by Simone Kermes and Maria Bayo respectively (audio only).

Rome and Antiquity - Reality and Vision in the 18th Century

Orsay Minerva, 2nd century AD
(marble replaced late 18th century)
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Rome and Antiquity. Reality and vision in the 18th century

Palazzo Sciarra, Rome

30th November 2010 - 6th March 2011

The Fondazione Roma, chaired by Prof. Emmanuele Francesco Maria Emanuele, is turning the spotlight on ancient art once more, with an extraordinary new event dedicated to the rediscovery of classical antiquity in Rome in the eighteenth century. curated by Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi, the exhibition gathers works of art and archaeological finds which highlight the key factor behind Rome’s rise to international renown in the eighteenth century, namely the rediscovery of classical Antiquity: a model for the arts, learning and style that spread throughout Europe. Promoted by the Fondazione Roma, the exhibition Roma e l’Antico. Realtà e visione nel ’700 (Rome and Antiquity. Reality and vision in the 18th century) has been organised in conjunction with Arthemisia group and springs from a partnership with the Capitoline Museums, the Vatican Museums and the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca.

The exhibition features an extraordinary nucleus of 140 works, including sculptures, paintings and sophisticated pieces of decorative art, and sees the involvement of important museums in Italy and abroad: as well as Rome’s most important museums, the National Galleries of Parma, Turin and Florence, the Canova Museum in Possagno, the Prado Museum, the Royal Palace and Archaeological Museum in Madrid, the Louvre, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Dresden’s Museum of Archaeology, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Royal Academies of London and Madrid.

Anton Rafael Mengs (1728-1779), Apollo and the Muses on Mount Parnassus
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Divided into seven sections, the exhibition explores the appeal of eighteenth century Rome and its extraordinarily cosmopolitan character: a city of monuments and magnificent ruins, interest in its historical past grew during the eighteenth century due to the archaeological digs which increasingly brought significant finds to light. The exhibition opens with a selection of vedute of ancient Rome and a group of capriccio paintings.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1780), Architectural capriccio
Private collection

The second section examines the great season of Roman archaeological digs in the eighteenth century which gave rise to the discipline of archaeology. The major works present in this section include the Capitoline Flora and Eros, the former found in Tivoli in 1744 and the latter from the important collection belonging to Ippolito d’Este, the Herm of Pericles from the Vatican Museums, the inspiration for a famous sonnet by Vincenzo Monti, and the valuable series of watercolour etchings illustrating the colourful wall paintings of the Domus at Villa Negroni and the Domus Aurea, now lost. The interiors of the latter can be admired in the video featuring the virtual reconstruction of this lavish residence.

Flora, 2nd century AD
Musei Capitolini, Rome

The topics of restoration, falsification and art dealing, of much interest to collectors in the day, are explored in the third section, which features the extraordinary Minerva d’Orsay from the Louvre, the result of restoration additions in white marble onto an extremely rare archaeological find in golden onyx. The latter, together with the 2nd century A.D. sculptures from the Prado (Head of Serapis and Bust of Hercules) and Dresden (Bust of Marcus Aurelius and Lemnian Athena), highlight how the aristocratic Roman collections dispersed, with the consequent diaspora of works abroad. On the occasion of the exhibition these masterpieces are making an exceptional return to Italy after more than two centuries.

Apollo with Lyre, 2nd century AD
Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican City

The subsequent section documents the work of two of the most famous Roman workshops, those of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and explores their trading activities for the first time. The exhibition features two extraordinary marble vases by the latter, who was primarily known as an etcher, made by assembling the fragments of ancient artefacts that he assiduously collected. As for Cavaceppi, the section presents a little-known group of terracotta pieces copied from famous classical works, illustrating the wealth of designs available to be reproduced in his workshop.

Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807), Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

The fifth section illustrates artistic training in the city and the spread of the Roman educational model, as the rest of Europe began to acknowledge the prime importance of classical antiquity.

Luigi Valadier, Dessert service for Carlos IV (1778)
Museo Arqueologico y Palacio Real, Madrid

One specific section looks at style and interior décor, featuring the stunning Dessert Service created by Luigi Valadier in 1778 and subsequently purchased by King Carlos IV of Spain. This incredible piece is both priceless and unique: a three metre long centrepiece in antique marble and semi-precious stones decorated with reproductions of classical buildings that the famed Roman sculptor and goldsmith dreamt up for an exceptionally wealthy clientele.

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Male nude study or Hector
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

The last section of the exhibition gathers a selection of paintings and sculptures by the most famous artists who looked to classical antiquity for inspiration. Antonio Canova, significantly acknowledged in his time as the greatest “emulator of Phidias”, closes the exhibition, with two masterpieces: Venus and Adonis from the Possagno Gypsotheque, and the Winged Cupid from the Hermitage.

Antonio Canova (1757-1822), Winged Cupid
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

The exhibition also features a highly original and atmospheric virtual reconstruction of the lost interiors of the Domus Aurea, designed by Stefano Borghini and Raffaele Carlani. Modern virtual technology has been used to bring historic drawings and watercolour etchings of this ancient artwork to life, giving us the chance to relive the vision that would have greeted eighteenth century observers. Visitors to the exhibition will thus be able to experience this fascinating spectacle of frescoes, stuccoes and mosaics and fully enter into the enthralling atmosphere of the rediscovery of antiquity.

Fondazione Roma official exhibition page
Exhibition page of sponsor Arthemisia Group

Chardin - The Painter of Silence

The Soap bubble
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Chardin: the painter of silence
Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara
17th October 2010 - 30th January 2011
Prado Museum, Madrid
28th February - 28th May 2011

The Palazzo dei Diamanti celebrates one of the most extraordinary artists of all time, Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), with the first monographic exhibition ever organised in Italy. The result of collaboration between Ferrara Arte and the Prado Museum in Madrid, and curated by Pierre Rosenberg, the world's leading expert on the artist, the show covers the whole career of this protagonist of eighteenth century art who, with his innovative painting technique and anti-conformity with regard to traditional academic rules, was able to elevate everyday domestic objects and the gestures of ordinary people to the subject of artistic expression.
Fifty-two masterpieces from some of the world's leading public and private collections will provide an unrepeatable opportunity to encounter this remarkable poet of everyday life who has been loved and admired by many of the greatest modern painters, such as Cézanne, Matisse and Morandi.

Basket of plums, bottle, glass of water and cucumbers
Frick Collection, New York

Chardin was one of the most original artists of his time. From a young age, he refused to follow the traditional paths of instruction through the academies and was one of the few young artists at the time not to make the Grand Tour in Italy. Furthermore, of all genres of painting, he avoided exactly those that in France at the time would have guaranteed status and fortune to the artist: the painting of historical or mythological subjects. Nonetheless, in 1728, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, to which Chardin had applied by submitting his first striking still lifes, recognized his talent and admitted him to their ranks as a "painter skilled in animals and fruits". Although he painted still lives, which were considered a minor genre and therefore no guarantee of success, Chardin soon became well known within the competitive Parisian scene.

Girl with Shuttlecock
Private collection

Over the next decade, he broadened his subject matter to include the human figure, with remarkable success. While eighteenth century France was busily engrossed in the luxurious life of the court and its fêtes galantes, fashioning a lifestyle from the ephemeral, Chardin was describing another reality. A contemplative and careful painter, he created the least "Parisian" canvases of the century by painting silence: a silence which pervaded both his still lives, picturing common domestic utensils arranged on rustic tables, and his interiors, in which the domestic servants and the offspring of the French bourgeoisie are shown thoughtfully going about their daily activities. Ornamental embellishment was banished, the pictures became poems to daily life, sensitively portraying humble people and transforming them into the key figures of their time. This period gave rise to such masterpieces as The Cellar Boy, The Governess and The Young Draughtsman in addition to the touching pictures of children at play, such as The Soap Bubble, Girl with Shuttlecock or Child with a Top. In each of these works, through an astonishing technical ability based on the correlations between tone and colour and the variations in the effects of light, the artist manages to convey to the observer his emotional response to his subjects.

A Vase of Flowers
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

Even when he returned to painting still life, Chardin continued to paint in this spirit, creating masterpieces like Bouquet of Carnations, Tuberoses and Sweet Peas, on loan from Edinburgh, about which Charles Sterling, one of the great art historians of the previous century, wrote: "Alongside Poussin and Claude Lorrain, Chardin is the one who has had the greatest influence on modern painting. Certain researches of Manet and Cézanne are inconceivable without Chardin. It would be hard to imagine anything more ‘advanced' in the way of layout and pictorial handling than the Edinburgh's Vase of Flowers. It stands out above anything of the kind painted by Delacroix, Millet, Courbet, Degas and the Impressionists. Only in Cézanne and in post-Cézannian painting can we hope to find so much power in so much simplicity."

Chardin gained public appreciation of his works beginning with the canvases he exhibited at the Salon from 1737. His pictures were also enthusiastically greeted by the critics, including the great Denis Diderot, who in 1763 publically lauded the realism of the painter's still lifes. Chardin was also much admired by the King of France, Louis XV, to whom the painter gave The Diligent Mother and Saying Grace, receiving in return the sovereign's esteem, and in 1757, the great privilege of residing and working at the Louvre.

Glass of water and coffee-jug
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Towards 1770, problems with his health caused Chardin to slow down, gradually abandoning painting in oils. However, without losing spirit, the elderly master inaugurated a new season in his art, using the delicacy of pastels to create portraits of extraordinary psychological intensity. With these works, we conclude the long career of this artist, who for all his life conceived of painting as a means of knowing reality, of carefully avoiding anecdotal content, while aiming for a timelessness reflecting the harmonious perfection between form and emotion.

The elevation of humble household utensils and the small daily activities of common people into artistic subject matter and his extraordinary technical skills made Chardin one of the most loved by modern painters such Cézanne, Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Morandi and Paolini, not to mention Vincent Van Gogh, who regarded Chardin "as great as Rembrandt."

The exhibition offers the occasion to retrace the key stages in Chardin's artistic career through a selection of works on loan from museums and private collections throughout the world, most notably, both for the quantity and the quality of the over 10 masterpieces generously lent, for the exceptional support of the Louvre.

Gallery of works on the official exhibition site

Cat with salmon, two mackerels, pestle and mortar
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

The scullery maid
Hunterian Museum, Glasgow