Portrait of Gabriel Bernard de Rieux

Gabriel Bernard de Rieux was a President of the Paris Parlement — one of the senior legal officials of the ancien régime — and La Tour's 1740 pastel portrait, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is among the most technically ambitious works the artist produced in his early career. The scale and complexity of the composition — showing the magistrate in his formal robes surrounded by attributes of his legal office — is exceptional for a pastel, a medium usually reserved for more intimate formats. Bernard de Rieux's choice of La Tour for so ambitious a commission reflects both his cultural ambitions and the artist's growing reputation in the early 1740s. The Getty's holding of this work places it in Los Angeles as one of the great French pastel portraits outside France.

Large-scale pastel on paper, one of the most technically demanding works in La Tour's output. The complex arrangement of legal robes, papers, and official attributes required La Tour to render multiple different materials across an unusually large format. The face, at the compositional centre, receives the full intensity of his analytical observation.