softness to their features. Contemporary accounts describe de La Tour's nature as lively, good-humoured, but eccentric. In many of his self-portraits he depicts himself smiling out from the frame towards the viewer; Laura Cumming states of de La Tour that "where other artists make heavy weather of portraying themselves, he takes the task lightly and seems to have produced more glad-faced self-portraits than any other artist". However, being of an excessively nervous disposition (which eventually descended into dementia), and an exacting practitioner, he has also been described as over-engineering his work, to the point of spoiling it. As de La Tour's wealth increased from his commissions, so did his philanthropy: he founded a school for drawing in his native Saint-Quentin and donated towards impoverished women in confinement and disabled and ageing artisans and artists. He was also advisor and benefactor to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, and the Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres of Amiens. Eventually confined to his home and to the care of his brother, Jean-François, because of encroaching mental illness, he retired at the age of 80 to Saint-Quentin, where he died intestate at the age of 83 (he had revoked earlier wills). Jean-François (d. 1807), chevalier de l'ordre royal militaire de Saint-Louis, was the natural heir to his estate. Gallery Commemoration French banknotes denominated at 50 francs, issued from 1976 to 1992, featured de La Tour's portrait. Footnotes References Abécédario de P.-J. Mariette et autres notes inédites de cet amateur sur les arts et les artistes. Archives de l'art français. 1856. t. III, 1854–56, pp. 66–78. de Goncourt, Edmond and Jules. French XVIII Century Painters. (1867) pp. 165, 171, 176 (first published Paris, 1867, fasc. 4, reprinted New York, 1948; second edition, 1873, pp. 271, 281-282). Tourneux, Maurice. La Tour, biographie critique. (Paris, 1904) p. 40. Jeffares, Neil, s.v. 'La Tour, Maurice-Quentin de', In Dictionary of Pastellists Before 1800, http://www.pastellists.com/Articles/LaTour2a.pdf https://neiljeffares.wordpress.com/2016/09/19/maurice-quentin-de-la-tours-parents/ Attribution . External links Masters Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of pastellists before 1800, online edition an interactive multimedia module about the Portrait of the Marquise de Pompadour in the Website of the musée du Louvre 1704 births 1788 deaths 18th-century French painters French male painters French portrait painters Pastel artists People from Saint-Quentin, Aisne 18th-century French male artists