Maurice Quentin de La Tour

Maurice Quentin de La Tour worked almost entirely in pastel, a medium usually treated as a quick sketch, and turned it into the most vivid portraiture of the French Enlightenment. He caught his sitters mid-expression, on the edge of a smile or a remark, so that a chalk drawing of a face seems to have just spoken. He portrayed the writers Voltaire and Rousseau, the king Louis XV, and, most famously, the king's mistress Madame de Pompadour, shown seated with music and books around her, a full-length pastel of dazzling ambition now in the Louvre.

He was as celebrated for his character as for his work, vain, sharp-tongued, and known for making his grand clients wait and sit exactly as he pleased. He kept many of his finest studies for himself, small preparatory heads done from life, which are often livelier than the finished portraits.

Late in life he grew mentally unstable and returned to his home town of Saint-Quentin in northern France, where he spent his fortune on charities, prizes for young artists, and support for the poor. He died there in 1788, the year before the Revolution, and left the town the great collection of his own pastels that still forms the heart of its museum.