Robert Tournières (1667-1752) was a distinguished French painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, whose refined portraits and candlelit history compositions secured him a lasting place within the French academic tradition. Tournières hailed from Caen, the port city and capital of the Calvados region in Normandy. After an early apprenticeship with a relatively obscure painter from his hometown, he enrolled at the Académie de Saint-Luc in Paris, where his formal artistic training began in earnest. In 1695 he was received as a master painter, and he continued his development under two of the most respected French masters of the period, Bon Boullogne and Hyacinthe Rigaud.

Tournières possessed a distinctive personal style. He favored dark backgrounds in which architectural details, foliage, and sky can be guessed at more than clearly seen, giving his compositions a mysterious tonal richness that set them apart from the more brightly lit productions of many of his contemporaries. His mastery of the figure emerges most clearly in his skillful rendering of moving hands and in his delicate and precise handling of natural flesh tones and coloring. These qualities, together with his fondness for atmospheric effects, gave his mature pictures a quiet, dignified presence that appealed strongly to the sophisticated French collectors of his generation.

Tournières was notable for the unusual distinction of being received twice into the Académie Royale de Peinture. He was first received in 1702 as a portrait painter, with his portraits of the painters Pierre Mosnier and Michel Corneille serving as his reception pieces. He was received again in 1716 as a history painter, with his celebrated Invention of Drawing of 1716, showing a pair of lovers illuminated by a single candle. This dramatic, tenderly lit composition drew on the ancient legend of the origin of drawing, in which a young woman traces the outline of her departing lover's shadow, and it demonstrated Tournières's ability to move between the two distinct professional categories of portrait and history painting.

Tournières's paintings are held today in the Louvre, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, and other significant French museum collections, where they remain valued examples of late Baroque French painting.