Maurice Quentin de La Tour

Maurice Quentin de La Tour was born on 5 September 1704 in Saint-Quentin, Aisne, France, the son of a musician, Francois de La Tour. In 1719 he entered an apprenticeship with a local painter named Dupouch, and around the same time went to Paris, where he trained in the studio of the Flemish painter Jacques Spoede. He spent time in Reims and Cambrai in 1724 and traveled to England around 1725 before returning to Paris around 1727 to resume his artistic development.

La Tour was agree, or approved as a candidate, by the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture on 25 May 1737, the same year he began exhibiting at the Paris Salon. He was received as a full member of the Academie in 1746 and promoted to councillor in 1751. In 1750 he was appointed portraitist to King Louis XV, a position he held until 1773. Over roughly 37 years he showed on the order of 150 pastel portraits at the Salon, a body of work that included sitters such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour, Joseph Vernet, and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert. He retired to his native Saint-Quentin at around age 80 and died there on 17 February 1788, at age 83.

La Tour's contemporaries and later writers treated him as a defining figure of French portraiture. Pastel specialists writing today continue to describe him as the most important pastellist of the eighteenth century, a reputation built on his ability to render psychological presence, not just likeness, within a medium then still considered secondary to oil.

La Tour's market is small and infrequent relative to his historical stature, reflecting both the age of the material and the concentration of his best-known works in museum collections. Auction aggregators point to a highest price near USD 1.16 million, reportedly for a pastel portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour sold at Christie's around 2007, but the exact work, sale house, and sale date could not be independently confirmed from available sources. Comprehensive public pricing detail is limited, and a definitive all-time auction record cannot be established or ruled out from the sources reviewed.

La Tour's auction footprint is small and the available price data is not fully verified, so any single reported sale should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable price trend. There is no published catalogue raisonne, and the most current scholarly reference is a recent monograph rather than a definitive works list, which places extra weight on museum provenance, Salon exhibition history, and academy archives when assessing a given pastel. Because so much of his major work sits permanently in institutions such as the Louvre, the Musee Antoine Lecuyer in his native Saint-Quentin, the National Gallery of Art, and the Getty, the pool of material that could ever come to market is inherently limited, which is itself a relevant fact for anyone evaluating scarcity.