[Music]
To me, there's something ethereal about the medium.
There’s something that brings a work a bit more alive.
And there's something quite magical when you open the boxes.
Pastel, to me, is this
strange, magical medium -
essentially, just millions of particles of coloured
dust clinging to a surface.
In the pastel, what you end up with on paper is very physical, very textured.
You have the pure colour of the pigment on the paper.
And that's what I like about the medium.
That's what attracted me to it.
La Maison du Pastel
initiated at the beginning of the 18th century.
It’s a business that was taken over in 1880 by a certain Henri Roché.
And he essentially was in discussion at the time with the artists of the late
19th century, people like Degas, Whistler, Sisley,
who were coming with issues that they had with pastel sticks.
And Henri Roché tried to respond to all these
problems, essentially made the pastels that we are still making today.
The beginning of it is really establishing a formula,
which is like creating a recipe for cooking.
It's not like there's a diploma for pastel making,
and it's not like there's one right way or wrong way of making pastels.
The way Isabelle learned,
and she passed on to me, was there was still an artistic aspect to it.
It was a lot about - you can't really explain,
you need to feel it.
Being open to all of these new materials
and finding my own way and finding my own voice with it.
I've always wanted
to put on a pastel exhibition here at the National Gallery.
It's not a medium that's very well known.
It's not a medium that's particularly well studied.
Pastel is magical.
It's this strange medium that is really unfamiliar today.
In the National Gallery, we've two and a half thousand oil paintings and
fewer than a dozen works in pastel.
Once we acquired ‘The Lavergne Family Breakfast,’
that really was the impetus to put this exhibition on,
not only to give this particular painting its moment in the spotlight,
but also that it gives us a chance to give people this kind of little glimpse
into the world of pastel.
I trained as an engineer.
I was working in the in the petroleum industry.
It didn't feel right anymore.
I had visited the atelier ten years before when I was still studying,
and at the time it hadn't spoken to me at all.
I was really heading towards being an engineer.
Ten years later, everything had changed
and suddenly it all felt like
this is the dream, the dream thing.
This is giving me purpose.
Everything in this picture is minutely observed.
So we see a gleaming coffee pot, these incredible impasto reflections.
We see a milk jug.
They themselves are drinking from
two Japanese Imari ware porcelain pieces, for these cups and saucers.
These beautiful colours, very, very delicate patterns detailed on them.
I think that's really typical of Liotard,
he spares us absolutely no detail.
These are works that have always been intended
to hang alongside, and frankly compete with, oil paintings.
There's nothing about these that is preparatory or sketchy.
They are highly polished, highly finished, and that's why we call them
‘paintings in pastel’.
I wasn't somebody who had an art practice who would be going to museums a lot.
And that's when I rediscovered this world of colour, of pastel, of artists.
I like how I moved from petroleum, which is black, to colour.
It's really a shift of, shift of world.
Works in pastel are incredibly fragile.
They are made up of millions of particles of coloured dust
clinging to a surface, whether that's paper that's been slightly
roughened or a kind of parchment or vellum.
It’s strange.
It’s survival is not certain.
The works that have survived,
it just feels really, really important to celebrate them.
Isabelle and Margaret at the Maison du Pastel,
they are really keeping the tradition of pastel making alive.
It's an extraordinary thing that they are crafting these in the same way
people would have been crafting them 200 years ago.
We're really trying to embody
the spirit of the company, which is what everybody did before.
You know, do what you feel is right and do it to the utmost quality
and respect for the material, for the artist, for the past.
and open eyes towards the future.
The fact that you can have a work like ‘The Lavergne Family Breakfast’
that's completely miraculous that we have a work
that's this old that survives like this.