Quentin de La Tour: Master Drawings

Maurice Quentin de La Tour (1704 – 1788) was a French Rococo portraitist who worked primarily with pastels. Among his most famous subjects were Voltaire, Rousseau, Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. He was born in Saint-Quentin, Aisne, a son of a musician who disapproved of his taking up painting. At the age of fifteen, La Tour went to Paris, where he entered the studio of the Flemish painter Jacques Spoede. He then went to Rheims in 1724 and to England in 1725, returning to Paris to resume ...