Charles Pinot Duclos (1704–1772), French writer and historian

Charles Pinot Duclos was a French writer, historian, and secretary to the Académie française — one of the central figures of the French Enlightenment's institutional literary culture. His Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle (1751) was a significant work of social analysis, and his position at the Académie gave him authority over the canon of French letters. La Tour's pastel of Duclos, in the Musée Antoine-Lécuyer, belongs to a group of Enlightenment intellectual portraits that are among the artist's most historically significant works. In these images La Tour extends the social prestige of his court portraiture to the republic of letters, asserting the cultural equivalence of the philosophe and the aristocrat.

Pastel on paper, with La Tour's characteristic analytical intensity directed at the face of a literary intellectual. The relatively informal dress of a man of letters — compared to court costume — allows La Tour to concentrate the full weight of the image on the sitter's face and expression.