Georges de La Tour

By merit of their lifelike immediacy, monumental stillness and pared-down sensibility, La Tour’s paintings mesmerize viewers with their poetic provocations. His entire oeuvre of some 40 paintings consists of genre scenes and religious subjects (often indistinguishable due to the lack of conventional saint attributes), seen in either daylight or candlelight. A profound spirituality finds expression in his works which frequently portray the ordinary and marginalized people, like blind musicians and old peasants, with great sympathy.

For the most part, La Tour worked in Lunéville in the duchy of Lorraine—an independent Catholic region fought between the French troops of Louis XIII and the Holy Roman Empire, which suffered throughout the 1630s. The artist moved briefly to Paris in 1639, where he was appointed first painter to King Louis XIII, before returning to Lorraine where he eventually died a celebrated artist. However, he fell into oblivion shortly thereafter and his works had been misattributed to the likes of Honthorst, Zurbarán, Ribera and Vermeer until Hermann Voss revived his name in 1915. He was deemed the ‘first French Surrealist’ by the cubist artist André Lhôte.

La Tour’s interest in everyday life and strong tenebrism represent a distinctive branch of Caravaggio’s influence in the north. A visit to Rome, possibly between 1610 and 1616 when fellow Lorraine artists Jacques Callot, Claude Dereut and Jean Le Clerc worked there, remains an open question but La Tour could well have seen Caravaggio’s Annunciation (Musée des beaux-arts, Nancy), which arrived in Nancy shortly after 1610. Artists in Lorraine, such as Bellange (with whom he may have apprenticed) and Jean Leclerc (who had worked in Rome with Carlo Saraceni), likewise explored such dramatic effects of light and shade. Dutch art was highly sought after in Lorrain and the works by the Utrecht Caravaggisti, such as Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen, could have also left an imprint on the artist.