Portrait of Madame Anne-Jeanne Cassanéa de Mondonville, née Boucon (1708-1780)

About this artwork

In 1747, the noted violinist and composer Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville married Anne-Jeanne Boucon (1708-1780), the daughter of a great art collector and herself a noted musician. She asked La Tour to make her likeness but claimed she could only pay half his usual rate. It is said that La Tour drew this complex, powerful portrait in just one sitting. When Mme de Mondonville sent him the amount she had promised, their friendship was ruptured.

Art Historical Context

Maurice Quentin de La Tour’s *Portrait of Madame Anne-Jeanne Cassanéa de Mondonville* captures the refined elegance of mid-eighteenth-century French society. Created around 1752, the work depicts the musician and salonnière Anne-Jeanne Boucon, wife of the celebrated composer Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville. De La Tour, renowned for his luminous pastel portraits of Enlightenment-era elites, brings a sense of vitality and psychological presence to his sitter through delicate layering of color and light. The medium itself is noteworthy: pastel on blue-gray paper, later mounted and enlarged by the artist with an additional three-centimeter band. This technical adjustment reveals de La Tour’s working process, allowing him to adjust the composition while preserving the soft, velvety texture that made pastel so prized in the Rococo period. Measuring 66 by 55 centimeters, the portrait balances intimate scale with formal presence. Today housed in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Prints and Drawings department, the work exemplifies the era’s fascination with both musical culture and the expressive possibilities of pastel, offering viewers a window into the artistic and social worlds of eighteenth-century Paris.