Includes bibliographical references and index.

Origins of the golden age: the invention of an art, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries -- A fashion for independent chalk drawing in Italy and France -- The early market for painting in pastel and its place in the Académie Royale -- Rosalba Carriera and 'The game of appearances' -- Maurice Quentin de la Tour and the triumph of pastel painting -- The golden age of pastel painting: France at midcentury -- The Turkish painter: Jean-Etienne Liotard of Geneva -- Women pastel painters of late eighteenth-century France -- British pastel artists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- John Russell, 'Prince of pastelists' -- Pastel in the British periphery: Ireland, Scotland, and America -- An audacious era: the nineteenth century -- A lengthy exile -- The past rediscovered -- The quest for legitimacy -- Outside the walls: pastel landscapes -- The revelation of Jean-François Millet -- The impressionist pastel -- Manet and the Parisian women of his time -- Degas and Cassatt: advocates of truth -- The nuances of Whistler -- The last word in elegance -- International renewal -- The exaltation of color -- The symbolist pastel -- Odilon Redon and the reinvention of pastel.