Georges de la Tour at the Jacquemart André Museum

Le Nouveau-né (New-born child) circa 1647-8  Musée des Beaux Arts, Rennes

The "New-born child" is the most popular painting in the exhibition - the postcards of it ran out after a few days! It is easy to see why. It expresses the holiness of the newly born child, perhaps the Christ child by implication. There are no haloes in the picture, but the artist somehow captures that sacred wonder by his artifice of the candle behind the hand illuminating the baby. Georges de la Tour's candle-lit scenes were extremely fashionable during his lifetime, but after his death his paintings fell into oblivion. A German art historian resurrected his memory in the early 20th century.

 

Le Souffleur à la pipe (Blower with pipe) 1646  Tokyo Fuji Art Museum

In virtuoso fashion, de la Tour illustrates the boy's blowing on an ember to rekindle it. His reds and browns, as in the new baby picture above, give a warm glow to the scene emerging from darkness. Here in the Jacquemart André exhibition, the "Blower" has been united with its presumed pendant on loan from Abu Dhabi: the girl blowing on the brazier: 

La fillette au brasero (the Girl at the brazier) 1640s  Louvre Abu Dhabi

Little is known about the early life and training of Georges de la Tour. He gained a reputation and a wealthy clientele among the aristocracy of the duchy of  Lorraine, where he was born in 1593.  A good marriage to the daughter of a local merchant, banker to the Duke of Lorraine, helped his career. It is thought that he had a small studio employing a few pupils who made copies of his works. In several cases, only the copies are known, the originals having been lost or still to be discovered in attics and museum reserves. The following portrait of St Gregory is possibly a studio copy:

Saint Grégoire circa 1630 Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon

It has been loaned from Portugal, where it was recently discovered. De la Tour frequently painted saints and apostles, in the realistic style recommended by the Counter Reformation. His masterpiece depicting Saint Thomas, using only four different colours (lead white, ochre, black and vermilion- no blue!), has been loaned by the Louvre. Here is Saint Thomas, patron saint of builders:

Saint Thomas  circa 1636  Louvre

A set of Apostles was painted for Albi cathedral. Dispersed at the French Revolution, six have been found. Saint Philip appears humble, like a simple working man, but with a divine light shining on him from the left:

Saint Philippe  circa 1620  Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA.

The artist's works may be split into two categories: daytime and night-time. They might also be divided into sacred and profane.  The exhibition curators have done exceedingly well in obtaining around twenty of the forty known works in the world attributed to Georges de la Tour. An early pair of paintings representing an old man and an old woman have a theatrical attitude about them, like a scėne de genre, where the woman appears to be berating the man:

Vieille femme (Old woman) circa 1618-19  Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The pair of paintings have been loaned from San Francisco. In both works, the costumes are painted in a refined manner against a neutral background. The old man appears to be listening in a browbeaten way, adding a certain comedy to the scene:

Vieil homme (Old man) circa 1618-9  Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

A sober painting of a couple of elderly people eating chick peas, as if they had been given charity outside a church  or hospital, contains an intensity and realism devoid of sentimentality. They are typical of de la Tour's early style:

Les Mangeurs de pois (Chick pea eaters) circa 1620  Gamäldegalerie,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin

There is something very modern looking about his close-up, in the fashion of Caravaggio who inspired so many artists at the beginning of the 17th century. Whether de la Tour took a trip to Rome is still a mystery, but he was influenced by Dutch tenebrism and by Northern artists who had studied Caravaggism in Italy. He saw a work by the master when he was twelve, since a scene of the Annunciation by Caravaggio came to St Georges' church in Nancy in 1605. 

A star painting in the exhibition is the famous 'lady with a flea'. It is fascinatingly absorbing, despite the unsavoury subject. The single source of light simplifies the shapes to give a contemporary geometric look, as the lady concentrates on squashing the flea:

La Femme à la puce (Woman with flea) circa 1632-5  Palace of the dukes of Lorraine, Nancy

The simplification and geometrisation induced by the candle light seems very modern. The girl is simply dressed and poor, perhaps a servant. The effect is not at all comic, but of intense concentration.

A rarely-seen painting of Saint John the Baptist contains a poignancy and feeling of interiority, thanks to the very simplified treatment. The work has come from the town of Vic-sur-Seille, where de la Tour was born:

Saint Jean-Baptiste dans le desert (Saint John the Baptist in the desert) circa 1650
Musee Georges de la Tour, Vic-sur-Seille, Moselle

Two portraits of Saint Jerome have been brought together from Stockholm and Grenoble. The first has a rich red cardinal's hat placed beside the saint. It refers to Cardinal Richelieu, the power in France at the time of Louis XIII. 

Saint Jérome pénitent (Saint Jerome penitent) circa 1630  Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

The Grenoble version shows Jerome with a dull ragged red cloth, not the rich red for the cardinal. It echoes the end of the bloody flail with which he has been punishing himself. (Too much red perhaps, so in the version above the pants are white!) Saints Jerome and Mary Magdalene are the two saints most painted by de la Tour. An exquisite Magdalene has come over from Washington:

La Madeleine pénitente (Penitent Mary Magdalene) circa 1635-40  National Gallery of Art, Washington

The atmosphere is austere and meditative. The repentant sinner's hand rests on the skull, a reminder of mortality, so that the candle is blocked from the viewer's sight. Another remarkable painting where the source of the light is not visible is the moving portrayal of Saint Irene extracting arrows from Saint Sebastian:

 

Saint Sébastien soigné par Irène (Saint Sebastian nursed by Irene) (detail) circa 1640-49 
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Orléans

 This is a copy from the workshop of de la Tour of the highest quality; the original has been lost. The story goes that the king was so impressed by this painting that he had all others removed from his bedroom in the Louvre and displayed only Georges de la Tour's. Saint Sebastian was usually invoked as protection against the plague. Unfortunately Georges and his wife both died in an epidemic in 1652.

Many artists have portrayed Mary Magdalene, in different fashions. De la Tour's sober, intense version is shown next to a contemporary work which is highly dramatic, a copy of a Caravaggio by Louis Finson:

 

Lodewijk Finson, known as Louis Finson after Caravaggio  La Madeleine en extase (Mary magdalene in ecstasy) circa 1606-13 Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseille

Further works by contemporaries of de la Tour show the similarity of technique and subject matter, such as Mathieu Le Nain's realistic scene  showing St Peter's denial of Christ:

Mathieu Le Nain: Le Reniement de saint Pierre (The Denial of St. Peter) circa 1655  Louvre

Certain very well-known de la Tours have not been permitted to leave their galleries- for example a very special one- a daytime scene of a trickster card-sharping a young aristocrat- remains in its place in the Louvre, as does a further scene of trickery in the New York Metropolitan: "The Fortune teller".

However Georges de la Tour's skill is amply illustrated by the selection of works obtained here. His unique artistry is creating an intense atmosphere in a candle-lit scene is powerful, as seen in his St Jerome reading:

Saint Jérome lisant (Saint Jerome reading) Workshop of Georges de la Tour circa 1648-50  Dukes of Lorraine palace, Nancy

After the master's death in 1652, Etienne, one of Georges' ten children, continued his work. Then for two and a half centuries, Georges de la Tour was forgotten. Thanks to Hermann Voss, the German art historian, 3 works, including the "New- born child", were tied to Georges de la Tour's name in 1915. The Louvre acquired its first work by the artist n 1926 ("Adoraton of the Shepherds") and by the 1930s, he had been fully reinstated. An exhibition of 17th century realist painters at the Orangerie in Paris in 1934 was a consecration of his popularity.

The present exhibition is on from the 11th September 2025 until the 25th January 2026 under the title: "Georges de la Tour. Between shadow and light."

Musée Jacquemart André, 158 boulevard Haussmann, 75008 Paris. 

Metro: Miromesnil

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