Georges de La Tour

French painter

• Born: March 14, 1593
• Birthplace: Vic-sur-Seille, Lorraine, France
• Died: January 30, 1652
• Place of death: Lunéville, Lorraine, France

La Tour, whose realist religious and genre scenes uniquely combined the baroque style and classicism, is best known for his use of light—candles, lamps, torches, and daylight—contrasted with shadow, to create a contemplative atmosphere. Within this baroque setting, La Tour imbues his characters with classicism’s reserve to create intimate scenes of silent communication.

Early Life

Georges de La Tour was born to Jean de La Tour, a baker in Vic, and Sybille de La Tour. Jean de La Tour traded land and wholesaled grain, practices that placed him in the town’s bourgeoisie. Although it was in Lorraine, Vic nevertheless was under the jurisdiction of the bishopric of Metz and was its administrative center. The city provided a rich cultural and intellectual life for the young La Tour. Vic had a lieutenant general, major administrative personnel, a mint, schools, and printers. The presence of rich salt mines brought wealth to the town.

The first archival mention of La Tour after his baptism on March 14, 1593, is 1616. Nothing conclusive is known about his activity in the twenty-three years between 1593 and 1616. During this period, he would have completed his apprenticeship and postapprenticeship study. The young La Tour may have apprenticed in Nancy with mannerist Jacques Bellange, the court painter of Charles IV, the duke of Lorraine. Because the greatest influence on the artist was the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio, La Tour might have gone to Rome after his initial apprenticeship; he also might have pursued his studies in Catholic Utrecht (now in the Netherlands) with one of the several followers of Caravaggio.

In 1617, La Tour married Diane Le Nerf, the daughter of wealthy nobleman Jean Le Nerf, minter to the duke of Lorraine. In 1620, the La Tours settled permanently in Lunéville, an important ducal headquarters in Lorraine and also Diane’s hometown. Her family probably had contacts important for La Tour’s artistic career. Lunéville was undergoing a period of rapid growth during this time. Duke Henry II had been building a château that needed the work of artists and artisans. It appears also that Lunéville had no established painter.

Life’s Work

La Tour began his successful career in the 1620’s. He hired an apprentice in 1620 and another in 1626. Duke Henry II commissioned two paintings. The La Tours also were able to buy the Le Nerf family mansion. This is the period of La Tour’s daylight genre and religious works, paintings whose light source is outside the work. In the 1620’s, he painted his early religious portraits, such as the series of apostles and his genre scenes of hurdy-gurdy (medieval stringed instrument) players, brawling musicians, and common people. A hallmark of La Tour’s style, the realistic and noble treatment of both commoners and saints, already can be seen in these early paintings.

The 1630’s were tragic years for Lorraine and Lunéville. The duchy became the battleground of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) between France and the Habsburg Empire, with which Charles IV was an ally. French troops battled for Lorraine starting in 1630, and King Louis XIII annexed the duchy in 1634. Famine and plague were rampant. The two sackings of Lunéville by French troops in September and October of 1638 were most tragic for the La Tours. Art historians believe these attacks wiped out a large part of La Tour’s production, especially the daylight paintings.

Despite the calamities of war, La Tour’s commercial and artistic success grew. The La Tours remained in Lunéville during the French occupation. Georges was friendly with the French occupiers and often served as a godfather or as an official witness for them. He profited by selling grain to both sides of the conflict and bought land from those forced to leave the city. Although details about commissions are sketchy, they appear to have come from French collectors in Paris or in Lorraine. La Tour stayed at the Louvre in 1639 as a guest of Louis XIII, presumably as thanks for a painting, and was granted the title peintre ordinaire du roi.

La Tour painted his most complex daylight subjects and the first of his nocturnal works before and during the 1630’s. Large narrative genre scenes such as Fortune Teller and two paintings of card cheats (Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds and Cheat with the Ace of Clubs ) are among the seventeenth century’s greatest genre scenes. His two paintings of the penitent Saint Jerome are his most ambitious daylight religious scenes and are the first expression of the Franciscan mysticism that would become the major force in the painter’s work for the remainder of his career.

In the mid-1630’s, he stopped painting daylight genre scenes and concentrated on nocturnal religious subjects. These nocturnal religious works, paintings whose light source is within the painting, are the works for which La Tour is best known. A candle, a lamp, or a torch within the work produces the dramatic contrast of light and shadow known as chiaroscuro. La Tour’s chiaroscuro creates an intimate atmosphere conducive to meditation and spirituality. His most famous nocturnal composition from this decade is the horizontal Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene , a subject that La Tour apparently presented to both King Louis XIII and Charles IV of Lorraine.

La Tour reached the summit of his success during the 1640’s, even in the face of continuing warfare in Lorraine. A new governor, Henri, maréchal de La Ferté-Sénectère, was installed in Nancy in 1643. Lunéville paid tribute to the governor annually by presenting him with a painting by La Tour. The six paintings La Ferté received between 1645 and 1652 are the best-documented commissions in the artist’s oeuvre.

La Tour’s most refined and moving nocturnal religious works come from this productive decade. Adoration of the Shepherds , The New-born , the vertical Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene, Christ with Saint Joseph in the Carpenter’s Shop , and Repentance of Mary Magdalene are all contemplative scenes of silent and intimate communication.

Significance

La Tour was a successful artist in his lifetime but was quickly forgotten after his death. Little of La Tour’s work is signed or dated, so his work remained unidentified until the beginning of the twentieth century, when German art historian Hermann Voss began to reconstruct La Tour’s oeuvre. His standing grew steadily throughout the century. In the 1990’s, a biography and two major retrospectives of the artist’s work in the United States and Paris solidified La Tour’s reputation as one of the great seventeenth century French artists.

Mystery still surrounds the artist, though. Little is known about commissions or the number of paintings he made. Approximately fifty works by La Tour have been identified to date. They divide almost equally between religious and genre scenes. Art historians disagree, however, on the dates and chronological order of the works. Also, there is disagreement about the subject and meaning of two paintings: The Flea Catcher and Payment of Dues (1630’s to 1640’s). Most important, the artist left behind no explanation of any kind about his work.

La Tour treated the most traditional religious and genre subjects in a unique style. He painted the Counter-Reformation religious scenes recommended by the Council of Trent, such as the founding fathers of the Church, the early apostles and martyrs, and subjects the Reformation Church criticized, such as the practice of penitence.

The subjects of his genre paintings are the same as those that were found all over Europe at that time: scenes of card cheats, fortune-tellers, and traveling musicians and beggars. La Tour stands out from his contemporaries, however, with both his realism and his unique style, which combine elements of the Baroque and of French classicism. La Tour’s characters, whether saints or commoners, are not idealized; they look like everyday people (even the saints), with all their imperfections, but still given dignity by the artist.

True to his realism, La Tour represents the divine symbolically with his use of light rather than through the use of halos and hovering angels. His nocturnal religious works combine the Baroque’s chiaroscuro with classicism’s reserve. The chiaroscuro creates an atmosphere conducive to contemplation or worship, so that it appears his characters experience some form of silent epiphany, perhaps even the mystical union with God, in a calm and inner-directed way.

Bibliography

Conisbee, Philip, et al. Georges de La Tour and His World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. A catalog from the 1996-1997 La Tour exhibition in Washington, D.C., and Fort Worth, Texas. A thorough study of all facets of La Tour’s work.

Grossman, Fritz. “Some Observations on Georges de La Tour and the Netherlandish Tradition.” Burlington Magazine 115 (1973): 576-583. This article theorizes that because La Tour studied in Catholic Utrecht after his initial apprenticeship, there are striking similarities between the paintings of La Tour and those of the Utrecht masters, Gerrit van Honthorst, Hendrik Terbrugghen, and Dirck van Baburen.

McClintock, Stuart. The Iconography and Iconology of Georges de La Tour’s Religious Paintings, 1624-1650. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. This study interprets twenty-one of La Tour’s religious paintings in the light of the religious, political, and artistic movements of the time.

Nicolson, Benedict, and Christopher Wright. Georges de La Tour. London: Phaidon Press, 1974. An Anglo-Saxon perspective of La Tour’s work.

Thuillier, Jacques. Georges de La Tour. London: Flammarion, 1993. An extensive biography of La Tour.