Portrait de la Maréchale de Belle-Isle

The Maréchale de Belle-Isle was the wife of Charles Fouquet, duc de Belle-Isle, Marshal of France — one of the most powerful military and political figures in the French state during the mid-eighteenth century. La Tour's pastel, given the year 1800 in the database (which must represent a cataloguing error, as La Tour died in 1788), belongs to the body of aristocratic commissions he received from the families connected to the court of Louis XV. The Maréchal de Belle-Isle appears elsewhere in La Tour's oeuvre, and the Maréchale's portrait is a natural pendant to that work. Portraits of military wives at this social level combined the prestige of the husband's rank with the expectation that the wife would herself be a presence of cultural authority.

Pastel on paper, with La Tour's characteristic rich surface. The Maréchale's aristocratic status required careful rendering of court dress — silk, lace, jewellery — as signifiers of rank and taste. La Tour's penetrating facial observation balanced the sitter's social performance with her individual character.