Jacques Dumont, called Le Romain (c. 1742): Art, History and Details

Jacques Dumont, called Le Romain (c. 1742) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Maurice Quentin de La Tour (French, 1704–1788).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Maurice Quentin de La Tour specialized in portraiture, and was praised by his contemporaries for creating uncanny likenesses of his sitters. He often created these works using pastel, a rich and powdery drawing material. He took up the technique for this quickly drawn sketch, created directly in front of his friend, the painter Jacques Dumont. La Tour used the drawing as a guide for Dumont's face in two different large-scale portraits in pastel, one of which is in the Louvre in Paris. During the 1800s this sheet was owned by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the brothers who, as writers and intellectuals, championed the art of 18th-century France and helped to revive interest in La Tour and other artists from that period.

Object facts

• Title: Jacques Dumont, called Le Romain
• Date: c. 1742
• Creator attribution: Maurice Quentin de La Tour (French, 1704–1788)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black and white chalk with pastel
• Dimensions: Sheet: 30.8 x 20.8 cm (12 1/8 x 8 3/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 1983.89

A detail from the museum

This drawing resembles two pastel portraits that Maurice Quentin de La Tour made of Jacques Dumont during the 1740s, but one work shows the sitter about to paint, while the other shows him playing a guitar.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de. "La Tour (2e et dernier article)."Gazette des Beaux-Arts 22, no. 3 (April 1867): 350-371.
• Burty, Philippe. Eaux-Fortes de Jules de Goncourt. Paris: Librairie de l'art, 1876.
• Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de. L'Art du dix-huitième siècle. Paris: A. Quantin, 1880.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.