Pastel paintings were central to his art, from empty beach landscapes of 1869, through the ballet, to women bathing and dressing in the 1880s, and fantasy landscapes of 1892.
pastel
Dubbed the King of Pastels for his court portraits, he went on to paint Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour, among many others.
From about 1878 until his death, Manet painted around 90 pastels. Seldom seen in exhibitions, they’re wonderful works. Here’s a selection of eight.
Applying his soft pastels to vellum, his paintings are hyper-realist in their fine detail. He was also an eccentric, living mostly in Turkish dress, and a renowned painter of portraits.
A superb painter in pastels, she painted Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, more than thirty times. She survived the revolution and terror to paint Napoleon’s youngest sister as a queen.
One of the most brilliant of the first wave of painters in pastels, a founding mother of the Rococo, and one of the greatest of all women painters.
Developed in the mid 1600s, pastels are often considered to be the ‘purest’ form of painting, in which pure pigment is applied to the ground.
His paintings of markets, including Paris’s famous Les Halles, are superb, as are his pastels.
An Armenian, born in Hungary (then), trained in Germany and France, married in Britain, worked in Poland and the Ukraine. His pastel on watercolour paintings are wonderful.
A mere theme, or an obsession? During his later career, Degas’ pastels of nude women getting out of the bath and drying dominated his art. Why?
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