Excerpt from La Tour<br><br>Very little is known of the years which immediately followed the young artist's arrival in Paris. He is believed to have made a journey to Rheims in the autumn of 1722, on the occasion of the coronation of Louis xv., and to have likewise visited Cambrai in the year 1724, at the time that a great con gress was held there. Fabulous stories have been told of the reception ac corded him in that city by the foreign dignitaries there assembled - how he executed a number of portraits of those celebrities, notably one of the beauti ful wife of the Spanish ambassador, which aroused such enthusiasm that he quickly found himself all the rage, and was invited by the ambassador from England to visit him in London. It seems highly improbable that a young artist, wholly unknown to fame, should have been the recipient of so much flattering attention, and it is generally conceded that these tales of La Tour's early success have been greatly exaggerated. It is, however, an accepted fact that he visited London, and although his stay there was brief he returned to Paris with sufficient money to enable him to open a studio of his own, and, knowing full well the tendency of human nature to place a higher value upon whatsoever bears a foreign stamp, forthwith announced himself as an English artist!<br><br>The medium of pastel had lately been made popular in Paris by a young Venetian artist, Rosalba Carriera by name, who had visited the French cap ital in 1720-21 and there achieved marked success. La Tour, whose health was never robust, finding his sensitive nerves unpleasantly affected by the smell of oils, profited by this vogue, and adopted pastel as the sole medium of his portraits, quickly superseding all others in popular estimation.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.