Georges De La Tour

La Tour was forgotten for over 250 years. When scholars rediscovered him in the early twentieth century, they found that many of his paintings had been misattributed to other artists, scattered across collections under the wrong names. The painter who had held the title "Painter to the King" under Louis XIII had simply vanished from art history. He was born in Vic-sur-Seille in the Duchy of Lorraine in 1593, the son of a baker. Whether he trained under Jacques Bellange in Nancy or travelled to Italy or the Netherlands remains uncertain; his candlelit compositions clearly descend from Caravaggio, but the influence probably reached him indirectly through the Utrecht Caravaggisti and other northern followers. In 1617 he married Diane Le Nerf, from a minor noble family, and in 1620 settled in her provincial hometown of Luneville, where he stayed for the rest of his life. His mature paintings are lit by a single candle or torch, and everything in them is simplified to geometric essentials: cylindrical limbs, smooth oval faces, fabric reduced to broad planes of colour. He painted the divine not with halos and angels but with light itself. Joseph the Carpenter, The Newborn and The Dream of Saint Joseph show religious subjects treated as intimate nocturnal domestic scenes, humble and startlingly quiet. He was involved in a Franciscan-led religious revival in Lorraine, and over his career he moved almost entirely to religious subjects. He achieved a certain prosperity: Louis XIII, Henry II of Lorraine and the Duke de La Ferte all collected his work. He died in Luneville in January 1652, a week after his wife Diane, during a pleurisy epidemic. His disappearance from the historical record began almost immediately.