Georges de La Tour

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Georges de La Tour
Born(1593-03-13)13 March 1593
MovementBaroque
Patron(s)Henry II, Duke of Lorraine
Signature
Joseph the Carpenter, 1642, Louvre.

Georges de La Tour (13 March 1593 – 30 January 1652) was a French Baroque painter, who spent most of his working life in the Duchy of Lorraine, which was temporarily absorbed into France between 1641 and 1648. He painted mostly religious chiaroscuro scenes lit by candlelight.

Personal life

Magdalene with Two Flames, c. 1640, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Georges de La Tour was born in the town of

Diocese of Metz, which was technically part of the Holy Roman Empire, but had been ruled by France since 1552. Baptism documentation revealed that he was the son of Jean de La Tour, a baker, and Sybille de La Tour, née Molian. It has been suggested that Sybille came from a partly noble family.[1]
His parents had seven children in all, with Georges being the second-born.

La Tour's educational background remains somewhat unclear, but it is assumed that he traveled either to Italy or the Netherlands early in his career. He may possibly have trained under

In 1617 he married Diane Le Nerf, from a minor noble family, and in 1620 he established his studio in her quiet provincial home-town of

Franciscan-led religious revival in Lorraine, and over the course of his career he moved to painting almost entirely religious subjects, but in treatments with influence from genre painting.[2]

Georges de La Tour and his family died in 1652 in an epidemic in Lunéville. His son Étienne (1621-1692) was his pupil.

Works

Saint Jerome
reading

La Tour's early work shows influences from

The Fortune Teller—and fighting beggars clearly derive from the Dutch Caravaggisti, and probably also his fellow-Lorrainer, Jacques Bellange
. These are believed to date from relatively early in his career.

La Tour is best known for the nocturnal light effects which he developed much further than his artistic predecessors had done, and transferred their use in the genre subjects in the paintings of the Dutch Caravaggisti to religious painting in his. Unlike Caravaggio his religious paintings lack dramatic effects. He painted these in a second phase of his style, perhaps beginning in the 1640s, using chiaroscuro, careful geometrical compositions, and very simplified painting of forms. His work moves during his career towards greater simplicity and stillness—taking from Caravaggio very different qualities than Jusepe de Ribera and his Tenebrist followers did.[2]

Getty Museum

He often painted several variations on the same subjects, and his surviving output is relatively small. His son Étienne was his pupil, and distinguishing between their work in versions of La Tour's compositions is difficult. The version of the Education of the Virgin in the Frick Collection in New York is an example, as the Museum itself admits. Another group of paintings (example left), of great skill but claimed to be different in style to those of La Tour, have been attributed to an unknown "Hurdy-gurdy Master". All show older male figures (one group in Malibu includes a female), mostly solitary, either beggars or saints.[3]

Dice-players, c. 1651, probably his last work. Preston Hall Museum, Stockton-on-Tees, UK.

After his death at Lunéville in 1652, La Tour's work was forgotten until rediscovered in 1915 by

Hermann Voss, a German art historian who would later become head of Hitler's Führermuseum;[4] some of La Tour's work had in fact been confused with Vermeer
, when the Dutch artist underwent his own rediscovery in the nineteenth century.

In film

Director Peter Greenaway has described La Tour's work as a primary influence on his 1982 film The Draughtsman's Contract.

Le Dîner de Cons, and is a major preoccupation of the protagonist in the 1984 Muriel Spark
novel The Only Problem.

A reference to a work purportedly by La Tour is featured prominently in the 2003 Merchant Ivory film Le Divorce.

Magdalene with the Smoking Flame (not Penitent Magdalene) is the painting in Ariel's grotto she longingly motions toward when she yearns to know about fire while singing "Part of Your World" in Disney's 1989 film The Little Mermaid.

Gallery

  • The Hurdy-Gurdy Player, c. 1610–1630, Prado Museum
    The
    Prado Museum
  • Portrait of an Old Man, c. 1624–1650, De Young Museum, San Francisco
    Portrait of an Old Man, c. 1624–1650, De Young Museum, San Francisco
  • Portrait of an Old Woman, c. 1624–1650, De Young Museum, San Francisco
    Portrait of an Old Woman, c. 1624–1650, De Young Museum, San Francisco
  • St Jerome, c. 1630–1632, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
    St Jerome, c. 1630–1632, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Galleries containing La Tour's works

Canada

France

Germany

  • Gemäldegalerie
    , Berlin

Japan

Spain

Sweden

United Kingdom

Ukraine

  • Lviv National Art Gallery

United States

See also

Notes

  1. ^ [1] Crissy Bergeron Thesis – page 7, and note 4, quoting Thuillier p.19
  2. ^ a b c Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700, 1953, Penguin
  3. ^ Wright, 35, 44–46
  4. ^ Dictionary of Art Historians (21 February 2018). "Voss, Hermann". Retrieved 18 May 2021.

References

External links