For more than two centuries, lighting a dark room with one small flame was a test few painters passed. It could make a reputation: one of them was known for decades only as the Candlelight Master, and a grand duke ordered a self-portrait on condition that it be painted by the light of a candle.
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How These Were Chosen
Paint gives off no light of its own. To make a flame seem to burn, the painter darkens everything around it, then decides how far its glow travels: which cheek it warms, where a face slides into black.
Candlelight also holds far less blue than daylight, so whatever it touches turns warm and gold. With one source, the painter chooses what the eye finds first and what stays buried in shadow.
Each picture here is a night scene built around one light in the dark: a candle, a lamp, a lantern, or a glow with no flame at all. Sometimes it is in plain view, often it is hidden, and once it lights almost nothing. A candle used as a prop in a daylit room does not count.
12. Trophime Bigot, Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene (undated)
Held high by a servant, a lantern shows its flame plainly through the glass, and it is the only light in the scene. Below it, a woman bends over a man bare to the waist and draws an arrow from his arm, while the background stays black.
The wounded man is Saint Sebastian, the martyr shot with arrows, and the woman is Irene, the Christian widow who, in the legend, finds him still alive and nurses him. Many night painters of the period tucked their flame behind a hand or a body. This one shows it in the open, and still its glow travels only a short way. It reaches Irene's hands, the arrow and the saint's chest, then gives out.
For a long time the picture had no painter's name. Art historians knew a group of night scenes painted in Rome, each lit by a single flame, without knowing who had made them, and the English historian Benedict Nicolson gave their author a working name, the Candlelight Master.
Nicolson then argued that the Candlelight Master was Trophime Bigot, a painter born in Arles, in Provence, around 1579, who turns up in Roman documents from about 1620 to 1634 under mangled names such as Trufemondi. The idea took decades to win, because the Roman night scenes look so unlike the altarpieces Bigot painted back in Provence.
The working name had said the essential before anyone knew who he was. This painter was recognized by one thing, the way he let a single flame light a few hands and faces and leave the rest to the dark.
At a Glance
Artist: Trophime Bigot (about 1579 to 1650)
Painted: Undated
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 127.3 × 162.5 cm (50 × 64 in)
Where to see it: Museum & Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina
11. Correggio, La Notte (Holy Night) (about 1528 to 1530)
The newborn lying on the straw is the brightest thing in this stable in Bethlehem, and he is also its only light. Shepherds crowd in from the dark to see him, and a woman near the child lifts a hand in front of her eyes, as though something in that stable were too bright to look at.