Maurice Quentin de La Tour (5 September 1704 – 17 February 1788) was a French Rococo portraitist who worked primarily with pastels. Among his most famous subjects were Voltaire, Rousseau, Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. 
Contemporary accounts describe Quentin de La Tour's nature as lively, good-humoured, but eccentric. In many of his self-portraits he depicts himself smiling out from the frame towards the viewer and his artistic career he “seems to have produced more glad-faced self-portraits than any other artist” (1).
We chose this portrait as the personification of the Enlightenment and lets see why.

The global expansion of European influence was matched by the extension of the boundaries of European knowledge that marks what has been called the Age of Enlightenment. It was in essence a new way of thinking critically about the world and about humankind, independently of revealed religion, of myth, and of tradition. 
 
First comes the science.
We have observed (in the previous article on Baroque) its beginnings in the seventeenth century, with the mathematical and scientific achievements of Descartes, Pascal, Newton, and Leibnitz.
Throughout the century, England enjoyed great material prosperity generated by inventions industry and democratic and agriculture and by international trade. 

​The middle-class, democratic values reflected in writings by Locke, whose works became almost the gospel of the Enlightenment. What we know, wrote Locke, comes to us through sense perception of the material world and is imprinted upon the mind as upon a blank tablet. From these perceptions alone we form ideas. Our ideas are not innate or God-given; it is only from experience that we can know (this is called the "doctrine of empiricism"). Human beings are born good, not cursed by original sin. The law of Nature grants them the natural rights of life, liberty, and property, as well as the right to freedom of conscience. Government is by contract, and its purpose is to protect these rights; if and when government abuses these rights we have the further natural right of revolution. (☝French Revolution 1789).
Happiness is to be gained by the rational pursuit of pleasure, which involves regard for the good of others. The founding documents of the United States clearly reflect these principles and these beliefs form the credo of American democracy. The work of Newton and Locke inspired the intellectuals of France.

​English poet Alexander Pope, a contemporary of Voltaire had declared: "The proper study of mankind Man!" New philosophies of human beings and of society as part of physical nature were advanced thinkers in France. They criticized the powers of church and state as irrational limits placed upon political and intellectual freedom. They believed that, by the accumulation and propagation of knowledge, humanity could advance by degrees to a happier state than it had ever known. This conviction matured into the characteristically modern "doctrine of progress" and its corollary doctrine of the perfectibility of humankind. By the end of the century, the Marquis de Condorcet, in his Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, could make of the doctrine of progress a kind of religion of utopia.