Portrait of Théophile Van Robais

Before a creamy beige background, Théophile Van Robais meets our eye with a direct and measured gaze. The delicate surface of the pastel conveys the textures of his closely shaven skin and neatly powdered, single-curl wig. Rather than crowding the composition with genre details, Perronneau included just one hint at a setting: the outline of a velvet-backed chair visible in the shadows.

Like his older colleague and rival Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Perronneau possessed a special gift for convincing likenesses and an extraordinary facility with pastels. Lacking La Tour’s connections at court, however, Perronneau spent much of his career traveling around France—and indeed the whole of Europe—with his pastel kit at the ready.

The sitter for this portrait, Théophile van Robais (1732-1799), belonged to a wealthy family of textile manufacturers from northern France. The jacket he sports here was probably once brightly colored. Long before this work’s arrival at the Getty, light exposure seems to have faded this sensitive pigment until it almost matched the background.

Learn more about this pastel and similar works in Eighteenth-Century Pastel Portraits on Google Arts & Culture.

Explore how artists pieced together large-scale portraits such as this in Pastels in Pieces on Google Arts & Culture.