pastel

pastel. A drawing or painting material consisting essentially of a stick of colour made from powdered pigments mixed with just enough resin or gum to bind them (in addition there is usually a mineral filler to give support to the stick); the term is also applied to a work produced with this medium. Pastel is applied directly to paper, with no diluent, and a significant difference between this and other methods of painting is that the colour as applied represents the final result—no allowance has to be made for changes during drying. It can produce very rich and subtle effects, but it has the disadvantage of being extremely fragile and easily dislodged from the paper. This can be counteracted by using a fixative, but fixing is apt to reduce the brilliance of the colour. As they are so delicate, pastels are generally used on a small scale, and they have always been especially popular for portraits.

Pastels originated at the end of the 15th century as a development from the use of chalk for drawing: Leonardo's famous profile drawing of Isabella d'Este (1500, Louvre, Paris) is in black and red chalk with touches of pastel (see also Perréal). At first colours were generally limited to black, white, and red or flesh-colour, but a full range of colours had been developed by the early 18th century. The first notable artist to devote herself almost exclusively to the medium was the Venetian Rosalba Carriera, who was internationally successful and helped inspire the great vogue for pastel portraiture in 18th-century France (Chardin, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, and Perronneau being famous exponents). During the first half of the 19th century the medium declined in popularity, but there was a great revival of interest in the second half of the century, especially among the French Impressionists, who found it well suited to their characteristic freshness of observation and speed of work. Cassatt, Manet, Redon, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Whistler were all notable exponents, but the supreme master of pastel at this time was undoubtedly Degas, who used the medium with a power, freedom, and inventiveness that none of his contemporaries matched. He described himself as a ‘colourist with line’, underlining the fact that pastel lies on the borderline between drawing and painting.