Exactly when pastels were first made is not known. Their history is also confused because both pastels and the earlier chalk drawings were often called crayon drawings. Pastels first became popular in 18th-century France, when the Venetian portrait painter Rosalba Carriera arrived in Paris ( c.1720) and her pastel portraits became fashionable. Jean Baptiste Perronneau (1715-83) won renown for his pastels of young girls; however, he was unfortunate in that his principal rival was Maurice Quentin deLa Tour, who became a master of the medium. La Tour was an accomplished draftsman who was able to capture the character of his sitters, whereas Perronneau's portraits border on the sentimental.

In the 19th century, Edgar Degas used pastels for his portrayals of ballet dancers. He is reputed to have used turpentine on his paper to make the pastels sink into the surface (a practice frowned upon by purists). Mary Cassatt, an American who spent most of her life in France and was a close associate of Degas, specialized in portraying mothers and children in both her paintings and pastels. Odilon Redon produced many still lifes of flowers, using an impressionistic technique well suited to the medium.