One of the greatest pastellists of the eighteenth century, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour is known as much for his insight into the character of his sitters as for his remarkable command of his medium. Shunning the rigid formulae of an earlier generation, he sought to engage his sitters, portraying them as living human beings rather than icons.  Unlike his contemporaries Chardin and Perronneau, La Tour never worked in oils, but confined himself exclusively to the extraordinarily expressive and luminous yet fragile medium of pastel.  Unpublished until its rediscovery in 1993 and with unbroken provenance back to the L'abbé Pommyer, this magnificent portrait of La Tour's lover, the famous singer Marie Fel, exemplifies the very best of the artist's abilities and his unmatched mastery of the pastel portrait.

La Tour's large-scale portrait of Marie Fel, which is made up of five sheets of paper, is amongst his most ambitious works, yet the intimacy of his relationship with the sitter is obvious. She sits comfortably at a table, resting her head delicately on her left hand. Her right hand is in her lap, holding a porte-crayon. Her cost.mes is grand, and fashionable; the bright blue silk of her dress shines vividly, and La Tour's mastery of the pastel is on full display in the detailed ruffling and shine of the fabric. The layers of lace at her sleeves are beautifully depicted as the fall gently on her lap and pool beneath her left elbow as it rests on the table. Behind her is a musical score of a song written by Fel's brother, and beneath her elbow rests a pile of papers in which a pastel drawing of Cupid has fallen off the edge to reveal itself. Indeed Cupid appears to be looking directly up at the sitter as he grasps his arrow at the ready.

The rather obvious allusion to their relationship in the Cupid drawing is not lost on the sitter, who looks directly at the viewer with a knowing smile. Formal portraits such as this would normally have shown the sitter with a more restrained expression, such as that seen on La Tour's portrait of Mlle. Ferrand (fig. 1), in which the sitter is shown in a similar pose to the present work. But La Tour's infatuation and intimate relationship with Fel provides us with a warmth and tenderness not seen in his other portraits.


Marie Fel was an enormously successful and widely admired opera singer who began her career in 1734 and remained a towering figure, premiering over 100 new roles, until her retirement in 1759. Though admired by many suitors, she ultimately remained attached to La Tour for the long term. La Tour was a frequent patron of the opera and theater, as reflected by his many portraits of singers, dancers and actresses throughout his career, and his relationship with Fel likely began as early as 1751. The pair eventually lived together in Chaillot, and in La Tour's will of 1784 he left all of his furniture and personal belongings (save for his telescope) to Fel.²

Until the rediscovery of the present work, the more famous depiction of Fel by La Tour was the smaller head study now at the Musée Saint-Quentin (fig. 2), in which the singer wears a headscarf reminiscent of her role as Amélite in Rameau's 1749 opera Zoroastre. Copied many t.mes s over and engraved by Goncourt and Lalauze, that exquisite and immediate pastel was likely done later than the present work, around the t.mes of Fel's retirement in 1759. Indeed the present pastel was traditionally known in the Pommyer family as "La Dame Bleue," and it was only upon its appearance on the market in 1993 that the sitter was correctly identified, based on the songbook. Jeffares acknowledges the physical differences between the two depictions of Fel and has speculated that the facial thinness seen in the later Saint-Quentin pastel could have been due to an intervening illness (at least two instances of illness for Fel are recorded, in 1746 and 1760 respectively).

La Tour was a native of Northern France and arrived in Paris in 1719, just in t.mes to view the work of the renowned pastellist Rosalba Carriera, who visited the French capital in 1720. La Tour was agrée by the Académie in 1737 and reçu in 1746; by 1748, he was at the height of his powers. Indeed he exhibited fifteen pastels at the Salon that year, including portraits of King Louis XV, Queen Marie Leszczyńska, and the Dauphin. After this spectacular showing La Tour remained for his long career one of the most successful and sought-after portraitists in France.

The present pastel can be dated with some confidence to the early 1750s. The inscription on the sheet of music, "les yeux de l'Amour/un cantatille," refers to a song composed for Fel by her brother Antoine, l'ordinaire de l'Academie royal de musique (fig. 3). "Les Yeux de l'Amour; septième cantatille a voix seule avec simphone" was one of two cantatilles, or short songs meant to be accompanied by a guitar, which he published in 1748, providing us with a terminus post quem for the pastel. Fel's elaborate blue silk dress would place the pastel in the early 1750s, around the t.mes of La Tour's famous portrait of Madame de Pompadour (fig. 4); indeed the two dresses, which reflect the utmost fashion of the day, are very similar in their style.

Both Jeffares and Salmon have suggested that this could possibly be the pastel of Fel that La Tour exhibited at the Salon of 1757, though with only limited contemporary descriptions one cannot be certain, and given the proposed dating it would have been made a few years before the exhibition. La Tour's incredible talent and intimate connection with the sitter resulted in great praise at the t.mes . Indeed in the Mercure de France the abbé Le Blanc wrote that "Le modèle du chant Mademoiselle Fel fait tant de plaisir a la voir si bien représentée, qu'on se sent plus vivement pressé du désir de l'entendre."⁴

A note on the provenance:

The pastel was in the collects ion of L'abbé François-Emmanuel Pommyer, an important and influential collects or in the Parisian art scene who counted La Tour as well as Chardin, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, and Jean-Jaques Bachelier amongst his close friends. The abbé, who was seigneur de La Guyonnière, had an impressive career as abbé commendataire de l'Abbaye royal de Bonneval and chanoine de l'Eglise de Saint-Martin de Tours, amongst other positions. An honorary member of the Académie royale de peinture, he built an important collects ion of paintings by the leading artists of the day, and himself sat to La Tour for a pastel portrait shown at the 1763 Salon (fig. 5). A number of his pictures, including the present lot, passed down in his family until their auction at Christie's London in 1993, where they were sold by the family of Baron Alred de Jacquier de Rosée. At the t.mes of the sale the provenance back to the abbé himself was tentative, but since then Jeffares has revised the provenance and firmly established the group as belonging to the abbé.⁵

We are grateful to Neil Jeffares for his assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.

1. Interestingly, the pastel is included in the 1912 marriage contract between the Baron de Jacquier and Anne-Marie Daly, where it is described as "La Dame Bleue" and given a value of 200,000 francs, quite a large sum at the t.mes .

2. Jeffares, "Maurice Quentin de la Tour", Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, London 2006; online edition [http://www.pastellists.com/articles/LaTour3.pdf], accessed 8 November 2022, cat. no. J.46.176, p. 3.

3. "Mademoiselle Fel's name inspires a secret joy. One immediately imagines a wonderful actress. We can say to ourselves with satisfaction, Miss Fel's voice is of admirable precision, and of a singular lightness." Pierre-Louis d'Aquin, in Siècle littéraire de Louis XV, 1754, vol. I, p. 174

4. "The drawing of the singer Mademoiselle Fel gives so much pleasure to see her so well represented, that one feels more strongly pressed with the desire to hear her sing." Salmon and Debrie 2000, p. 197.

5. Jeffares 2001.