Georges de la Tour: The Complete Story
Georges de La Tour painted the calmest candlelight in European art, was famous enough that Louis XIII kept only his painting in the royal chamber, then vanished from history for 250 years. About 40 paintings survive. The man behind them was nothing like them.
A baker's son from Lorraine who died in an epidemic, was forgotten by 1700, and was reinvented as a master in 1915. This is the strangest resurrection in art history.
Georges de La Tour at a glance:
1593: baptized in Vic-sur-Seille, Lorraine, a baker's son who will marry into minor nobility.
1620: sets up in Lunéville under ducal privilege, exempt from taxes and rarely letting anyone forget it.
1638: Lunéville burns in the wars of Lorraine, taking his house, workshop and early production.
1639: named peintre ordinaire du roi in Paris; the Saint Sebastian legend attaches to the title.
1652: dies of epidemic in Lunéville within days of his wife; the name then vanishes for 263 years.
A baker's son in Lorraine
La Tour was born in Vic-sur-Seille, in the duchy of Lorraine, on March 13, 1593, the son of a baker. He married into minor nobility in 1617 and settled in Luneville, where he ran a workshop, bought land, and grew wealthy while Lorraine was ravaged by the Thirty Years War, plague, and fire around him.
The king who kept only one painting
His fame was real in his lifetime. Named painter to the Duke of Lorraine, he was granted the title of Peintre ordinaire du Roi to Louis XIII in 1639.
According to an early account, the king admired La Tour's Saint Sebastian so much that he had every other painting removed from his chamber to hang it alone. Cardinal Richelieu owned his work too.
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Candles, cheats, and silence
La Tour worked two registers. Daylight scenes of trickery, like The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds at the Louvre and The Fortune Teller at the Met, all sideways glances and stolen coins.
And the night scenes that made him immortal: the Magdalene watching a smoking flame, The Newborn at Rennes, figures simplified almost to geometry around a single candle. He signed few, dated fewer, and left no letters about art.
The myth of the gentle mystic
The serenity of the paintings suggests a serene man. The archives say otherwise.
Documents from Luneville record complaints that La Tour hoarded grain, sent his dogs through peasants' crops, and behaved with a hardness his neighbors resented.
The stillness we love was a professional product, not a portrait of its maker, which makes it more remarkable, not less.
Dead in 1652, reborn in 1915
La Tour died in Luneville on January 30, 1652, during an epidemic, and his name simply evaporated. His paintings were reattributed to Vermeer, Velazquez, and the Le Nain brothers.
In 1915 the German scholar Hermann Voss reassembled the artist from archives, and the 1934 Paris exhibition Painters of Reality made him a national treasure overnight.
Today about 40 accepted paintings exist, at the Louvre, the Met, Rennes, Nantes, and the museum of his birthplace in Vic-sur-Seille.
The fire that ate the early work
In 1638 Lunéville burned as armies crossed Lorraine, and La Tour's house and workshop went with it.
Plague and requisitions emptied the town more than once; he sheltered in Nancy, petitioned the authorities, rebuilt.
The tiny surviving corpus is partly that history: the career's first half survives only in what had already been sold and carried elsewhere.
Étienne and the copies problem
His son Étienne trained in the shop, painted, and inherited the models. Which canvases are father, son or copyist keeps conference rooms in Nancy and Paris busy.
Several famous compositions exist in two or three versions, and some originals are known only through copies: ghosts with documented names.
Every few decades a version changes camps, and a museum label somewhere quietly gains or loses millions.
The Vic-sur-Seille homecoming
His birth town waited three and a half centuries: in 1994 the Moselle département paid a French record for a rediscovered Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness.
A museum bearing his name opened in Vic-sur-Seille in 2003, anchored on that single canvas and loans.
A painter with no grave and almost no paper has an address again, a few streets from the font where the baker's son was baptized.
The Georges de La Tour questions that keep coming up
Why was Georges de La Tour forgotten? He worked far from Paris, signed little, and had no biographer. Within fifty years of his death in 1652 his paintings were being sold under other artists' names.
How many La Tour paintings survive? Around 40 accepted canvases, one of the smallest bodies of work of any major old master, which is why attribution fights around him are fierce.
Where can I see La Tour? The Louvre and Rennes in France, the Met in New York, and the Musee Georges de La Tour in Vic-sur-Seille, his birthplace.
Was La Tour influenced by Caravaggio? Almost certainly through the Utrecht followers of Caravaggio rather than Italy itself. No Italian trip is documented, and his candlelight is quieter than anything in Rome.
Did he sign his work? Sometimes, in elegant Latin capitals, which is how the 1915 resurrection could begin: signatures sitting unread on unattributed canvases.
Was he famous in his lifetime? In Lorraine and at the French court, yes: ducal privileges, then peintre ordinaire du roi in 1639. The fame died with the duchy and had to be rebuilt from archives.
More secrets to unlock
A matter of state in sixty years
When the Fortune Teller surfaced in 1960 and was bought by the Met, France debated in parliament how a La Tour had escaped the country: a painter nobody had heard of in 1900 had become a matter of state in sixty years.
