Abbé Nollet

Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet was the most celebrated experimental physicist in France before Lavoisier, famous for spectacular public demonstrations of electricity including the discharge of a Leyden jar through a chain of monks. La Tour's portrait of 1753, now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, captures Nollet at the height of his fame as a lecturer and demonstrator. The oil-on-canvas medium is unusual for La Tour at this date, when pastel dominated his output, and may reflect either the sitter's preference or the more official character of this particular commission. Nollet was appointed preceptor in natural philosophy to the royal children in 1753, which would have made a formal portrait appropriate. The German provenance reflects the broad European dispersal of La Tour's work through the aristocratic and collecting networks of the eighteenth century.

Oil on canvas in La Tour's mature manner, with precise facial observation translated into the oil medium. The intellectual sitter's features are rendered with the same analytical directness La Tour applied in pastel, though the oil medium allows richer tonal modelling in the shadows.