Most of us are drawn to art — in whatever genre, portraiture, history painting or still life — because it provides us with a unique form of inner experience. Bryan Magee, who articulates the clearest argument for why we cannot express that in words, also observes that “the conception we have of any individual we know nearly always starts with what he or she looks like.” ^[4] Portraiture draws its importance from both those propositions. Ezra Pound’s concept, ^[5] “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”, applies equally to portraiture as to poetry. Freud’s doctrine of “affective contagion”, which allows artists to share their intense feelings with others (and is close to Leo Tolstoy’s concept of real art as a mental union of perceiver and artist), ^[6] inspired Roland Barthes ^[7] to describe the process of “induction”: “Le corps qui va être aimé est, à l’avance, cerné, manié par l’objectif, soumis à une sorte d’effet zoom, qui le rapproche, le grossit et amène le sujet à y coller le nez: n’est-il pas l’objet scintillant qu’une main habile fait miroiter devant moi et qui va m’hypnotiser, me capturer?” That skill, of representation that stops you in your tracks and compels attention, is the essence of good portraiture.

But where do we find good portraiture? As a child, I was brought up by my mother with an abhorrence of the frivolity and sentimentality to which painting descended in eighteenth century France — a view based on the Greuzes in the Wallace Collection seen through the eyes of someone trained at the Slade and the Courtauld Institute in the 1930s. ^[8] Much later, I started to look more closely, and I came to realise that there is rather more to the dix-huitième than this: in particular, the portraiture of the period offers an astonishing quality of execution from a remarkable number of artists. Jean Starobinksi has written: “Ce qui fait du xviii^e siècle le grand siècle du portrait, c’est l’intuition d’une nature inépuisable, qui ne se répète jamais, et n’est satisfaite que lorsqu’elle crée de la différence.” ^[9] I think all dix-huitiémistes will recognise this.

And right at the centre of that effort is the pastel portrait: here, stripped of the pomp and pretension of the official oil paintings, are the most intimate communications — the medium used by Chardin to sum up a lifetime’s observation; the medium chosen by impatient subjects too busy for the longer sittings required for a portrait in oils; the medium selected by informed patrons for their private apartments (and still, two hundred and fifty years later, unavailable to be seen by the general public); the medium of so many icons of the Enlightenment, a movement which itself coincided with the golden age of this art.

How and why did the pastellists working in France before the Revolution uniquely capture our attention so strikingly, coherently and beautifully, compelling us to set aside political and social considerations?

As with all portrait painters before the invention of photography they were unburdened by the existential questions of representation: obtaining a good likeness was unselfconsciously a clear and specific target — indeed disputes about their success filled the Châtelet ^[10] and are a rich source of information about obscure painters who had fallen out with their clients and better established ones called in to provide expert testimony. (The conventional phrase “capturing a likeness” distracts from a more serious, Barthesian point: in a successful portrait, it is the sitter who captures the viewer.) But that of course is a very incomplete prescription for recreating works that to modern eyes are dominated by conventions: conventions of composition and of accessories (less central, and so less hackneyed, with simple pastel busts than in the official portraits d’apparat almost always executed in oil), as well as technical conventions of just how paint or pastel is applied to the support to create those representations. The story here of the dix-huitième pastel is the pursuit of the exquisite, a concept which (as Guillaume Glorieux ^[11] has argued) was legitimised by Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, whose publication in France in 1740 was taken as a justification for a short century’s display of conspicuous consumption, of the douceur de vivre or the obscene displays of luxe insolent that brought about a Revolution. Rousseau noted that “D’autres maux pires encore suivent les Lettres & les Arts. Tel est le luxe, né comme eux de l’oisiveté & de la vanité des hommes. Le luxe va rarement sans les sciences & les arts, & jamais ils ne vont sans lui.” ^[12] We have been embarrassed about this ever since — with the exception of the end of the nineteenth century, when there was a brief return to the values of the heady days of the Ancien Régime before the world was again returned to sobriety by war. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Belle Époque and the Ancien Régime are singled out in Thomas Piketty’s recent work as high points of wealth inequality; as we return to those levels today, perhaps a third wave of interest in pastel should be expected.

The need for pastels to be carefully conserved — that sense of vulnerability – itself contributed to a sense of preciousness. Diderot’s biblical rebuke to his friend La Tour, “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris”, ^[13] can be read today on various levels: the physical fragility of pastel; the loss of information about sitters and artists; and even the swings of fashion through which the work of an entire century can be neglected.

To fragility must be added a concept of purity and immediacy arising from the unique feature of pastel compared with other forms of painting. Since the prehistoric invention of colour, artists have sought to employ the widest range of hues which are to be found, particularly in naturally occurring minerals. But while some of these (notably black and red chalks) were soft enough to leave a line on paper, and were therefore suitable for drawing, most were too hard to be used directly for any graphic purpose. The grinding into fine powder then left the problem of application, which required some vehicle — a medium such as egg white, linseed oil or any of the many substances with which artists have constantly experimented. All had the unfortunate effect of encasing the fragments of pigment in a liquid whose refractive index altered fundamentally the way they reflected light. The breakthrough offered by pastel (at the expense of fragility) was the possibility of binding pigments with clay and other dry ingredients to make a stick soft enough to spread evenly over paper (like paint) without changing the pigments’ optical properties. That in a word is what is so exciting about pastel — and what explains the delight of seeing a well-made portrait in exactly the form it left the artist’s studio 250 years ago without having had the varnish replaced every other generation since. You are indeed one step closer to being in the sitter’s presence if you don’t have to see him or her through brown Windsor soup. ^[14]

* * *

C’est un curieux; il a beaucoup de pastels chez lui. ^[15]

If the unique attraction of the pastel portrait is now clearer, what is to be said of those who collect them? It is clear that, even by 1694 when the first edition of the Académie française’s Dictionnaire appeared, there was a recognition of something special about a collection of pastels, and that such a collection could evidence that its possessor was a “curieux”. A curieux is “celuy qui prend plaisir à faire amas de choses curieuses & rares; ou celuy qui a une grande connoissance de ces sortes de choses”, while adjectivally, curieux defines one “qui a beaucoup d’envie & de soin d’apprendre, de voir, de posséder des choses nouvelles, rares, excellentes &c.” When Liotard announced his presence in The Public Advertiser in London, his notice was addressed To the Curious. ^[16]

There are hints of obsesssion and perhaps other pathologies in this language (one author ^[17] detected in the intimacy and immediacy of pastel “an erotic or fetishistic quality”), which are amplified in the many studies that have been made of collecting in general. But if anything is to be learned by studying those who have collected pastels (there is an extended list included in the online Dictionary of pastellists ^[18] ), it is surely that the range of motives, the breadth of other interests, the mixture of genes, the manner in which they have acquired money, and even the level of affluence they have required to pursue their interest, simply cannot be reduced to any single theme. Except one: passion. And I am delighted that Jacques-Louis Isoz’s can now be shared with all.

Neil Jeffares