Jacques Dumont, called Le Romain

1742

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Dominant colour

Jacques Dumont, called Le Romain is a 1742 by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Maurice Quentin de La Tour
When & what style?: 1742 · Baroque
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

This is a pastel sketch of a man with soft, powdery strokes—his face half-lit, eyes sharp, lips slightly parted. The lines look quick, almost like he’s about to speak. La Tour made this in one sitting, right in front of his friend Jacques Dumont. It’s not a finished portrait, just a study for bigger works later. Pastels let him blend colors fast, catching the way light hits skin before it changes. Look up *sfumato*—a technique that softens edges, like smoke, to see how other artists blurred faces just like this.

The story of this work

Overview

Maurice Quentin de La Tour specialized in portraiture, and was praised by his contemporaries for creating uncanny likenesses of his sitters. He often created these works using pastel, a rich and powdery drawing material. He took up the technique for this quickly drawn sketch, created directly in front of his friend, the painter Jacques Dumont. La Tour used the drawing as a guide for Dumont's face in two different large-scale portraits in pastel, one of which is in the Louvre in Paris. During the 1800s this sheet was owned by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the brothers who, as writers and…

Did you know?

This drawing resembles two pastel portraits that Maurice Quentin de La Tour made of Jacques Dumont during the 1740s, but one work shows the sitter about to paint, while the other shows him playing a guitar.

Read the full account in the museum source.