Georges de La Tour
The quiet painter of light.
Georges de La Tour in Lorraine painted scenes lit by a single light. He was forgotten and rediscovered only in the 20th century.
Georges de La Tour was born in 1593 in Vic-sur-Seille in the Duchy of Lorraine, which did not then belong to France. He was the son of a baker. Where he learned to paint is unknown. He may have travelled to Italy or the Netherlands and seen Caravaggio's followers there, but there is no evidence. In 1617 he married Diane Le Nerf, who came from a noble family, and they moved to her home town of Lunéville.
He became a wealthy and respected man. He received commissions from the Duke of Lorraine and later from France, and in 1639 he was given the title of painter to the king. At the same time, archival records show that he was arrogant and violent towards peasants and that the townspeople complained about him. Lorraine was hit hard by the Thirty Years' War, and Lunéville was burned in 1638.
His early paintings are daylight scenes of sharp realism, such as The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds in the Louvre, in which a young man is cheated at the card table while the glances give away the plot. He is, however, best known for his night scenes. In them a single light, often a candle or a lantern, illuminates simplified figures in a dark room. Examples are Saint Joseph the Carpenter in the Louvre and several versions of the penitent Mary Magdalene, who sits lost in thought before a flame and a skull. The forms are smooth and geometric and the mood still and devout.
La Tour died in Lunéville in January 1652, shortly after his wife, probably in an epidemic. Only about forty paintings by him are known today.
After his death he was completely forgotten, and his works were attributed to other painters. A German art historian identified him in 1915, and an exhibition in Paris in 1934 made him famous. His still, almost modern simplification of form means that he is now regarded as one of the great French painters of the 17th century.