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| France money 50 French Francs banknote |
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| France banknotes50 French Francs banknote, Quentin de La Tour |
France money 50 French Francs banknote of 1983 Quentin de La Tour , issued by the Bank of France - Banque de France.
Banknotes of France, French franc, French banknotes, currency of France, French printed banknotes, France paper money, French bank notes, France banknotes, French paper money, French currency , France bank notes, French currency history, French currency image gallery, old French currency, collection of French paper money, Billets de banque en franc français, collection de papier-monnaie billets français, Les billets de la Banque de France, Papier monnaie - Billets France.Euro exchange rate: 50 French Francs are the equivalent of 7 euros 62 euro cents (fixed rate of 6.55957 francs for 1 euro).
Obverse: Portrait of Maurice Quentin de la Tour (1704 – 1788) French Rococo portraitist. In the background - View of Palace of Versailles with several fountains that adorn the large basins.
Reverse: Same portrait of Maurice Quentin de la Tour. In the background - facade of the Saint Quentin City Hall (city of Saint-Quentin, Picardy on northern France), his hometown.
Watermark: Face of Maurice Quentin de la Tour from another self-portrait.
The dimensions are 150 mm x 80 mm.
The dominant colors are brown and blue-gray.
Printed by Banque de France from 1976 to 1992.
The banknote was designed by Bernard Taurelle, after a work by Lucien Fontanarosa which was inspired by pastel portrait of Maurice Quentin de La Tour, exhibited at Musée Antoine Lécuyer, engraved by Henri Renaud and Jacques Combet.
The 50 French francs Quentin de La Tour created by the Banque de France 15 June 1976 and issued on 4 April 1977. This bill replaces the 50 francs Racine and was replaced by the 50 francs Saint-Exupéry .
This note printed polychrome intaglio belongs to the second major series of "famous scientists and artists" commissioned by the Banque de France and which include Berlioz, Debussy, Delacroix, Montesquieu and Pascal.
The 50 francs Quentin de La Tour series, ceased to be legal tender from 30 November 2005: after this date 50 francs Quentin de La Tour can no longer be exchanged against the euro.
French Banknotes
1968-1997 Issue
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.
He was born in Saint-Quentin, Aisne, the third son of a musician, François de La Tour, a Laonnois and the son of a master mason, Jean de La Tour of Laon and Saint-Quentin who died in 1674. François de La Tour apparently was successively a trumpet-player for the rifle regiment of the duc du Maine, and musician to the master of the Collegiate Church of Saint-Quentin. He is popularly said to have disapproved of his son taking up the arts, but there is nothing to support that. According to François Marandet in 2002, an apprenticeship was arranged for La Tour with a painter named Dupouch from 12 October 1719, but it is not known when this contract was terminated. Little is known of Quentin de La Tour's background until, when barely nineteen, he went to Paris indefinitely, fleeing an indiscretion concerning his cousin, Anne Bougier; by this age he was claiming painting as his profession. After travelling briefly to England in 1725, he returned to Paris in 1727, where he was encouraged to begin working as a portraitist in pastels. His earliest known portrait, of which only an engraving by Langlois of 1731 is testament, was that of Voltaire.
In 1737 at the Paris Salon, La Tour exhibited the portraits of Madame Boucher, the wife of the painter François Boucher, and l'Auteur qui rit or Self-Portrait, Laughing (musée du Louvre), the first of a splendid series of 150 portraits that served as one of the glories of the Paris Salon for the next 36 years. Nevertheless, the painter Joseph Ducreux claimed to be his only student (although this is unlikely). On 25 May 1737 La Tour was officially recognised (agréé) by the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and soon attracted the attention of the French court. According to Jeffares, he had an apartment in the palais du Louvre in 1745, although his portraits for the royal family had ceased by the late 1760s. La Tour was popularly perceived as endowing his sitters with a distinctive charm and intelligence, while his delicate but sure touch with the pastel medium rendered a pleasing softness to their features.
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; Laura Cumming states of La Tour that "where other artists make heavy weather of portraying themselves, he takes the task lightly and seems to have produced more glad-faced self-portraits than any other artist". However, of an excessively nervous disposition (which eventually descended into dementia), and an exacting practitioner, he has also been accused of over-engineering his work, to the point of spoiling it.
As La Tour's wealth increased from his commissions, so did his philanthropy; he founded a school for drawing in his native Saint-Quentin and donated towards poor women in confinement, and disabled and ageing artisans and artists. He was also advisor and benefactor to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, and the Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres of Amiens. Eventually confined to his home and the care of his brother, Jean-François, because of encroaching mental illness, he retired at the age of 80 to Saint-Quentin, where he died intestate at the age of 83 (he had revoked earlier wills). Jean-François de La Tour (d. 1807), chevalier de l'ordre royal militaire de Saint-Louis, was the natural heir to his estate.
The musée Antoine Lécuyer in the town of Saint-Quentin is home to many of La Tour's pastels from his own studio; it offers the visitor not only a synthesis of La Tour's life and work but also a selective and concentrated view of French eighteenth century society and costume.
The Palace of Versailles, or simply Versailles, is a royal château in Versailles in the Île-de-France region of France. In French it is the Château de Versailles.
When the château was built, Versailles was a country village; today, however, it is a wealthy suburb of Paris, some 20 kilometres southwest of the French capital. The court of Versailles was the center of political power in France from 1682, when Louis XIV moved from Paris, until the royal family was forced to return to the capital in October 1789 after the beginning of the French Revolution. Versailles is therefore famous not only as a building, but as a symbol of the system of absolute monarchy of the Ancien Régime.