From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Georges de La Tour (1593–1652) is invariably categorised as one of the Caravaggisti, the international group of painters who spread the style of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio across Europe in the first half of the 17th century. Stylistically, the candlelight scenes, rich in religiosity, for which La Tour is best known confirm him as one of the more innovative of their number, taking the Italian’s mixture of the sacred and profane in new directions. However, the trajectory of his career and of his posthumous reputation more closely mirrors that of a different, younger and more celebrated contemporary, Vermeer.

Both men spent their working lives largely outside the main artistic centres of their nations – La Tour in Lunéville in Lorraine, Vermeer in Delft; both gained a degree of recognition in their lifetimes but never ascended to the first rank; both left a modest number of paintings behind (only some 40 agreed works by La Tour and about 35 by Vermeer); neither was particularly innovative in their choice of subjects; the civil and art-historical traces for each are sparse; neither left a lasting impression on the painters that followed; both sank into obscurity following their deaths; and both were rediscovered only in the 20th century – in La Tour’s case, thanks to Hermann Voss, in a pioneering article in 1915.

While the pictures of the two painters had little in common (Vermeer’s early foray into genre painting with The Procuress, 1656 – made four years after La Tour’s death – being the closest they ever came), the artists nevertheless shared a sensibility. The two men were painters of profoundly contemplative works that for all their differences are among the most inscrutable of their time.

However, the questions surrounding La Tour are more numerous even than those around Vermeer. He left almost no correspondence and barely featured in the texts of the connoisseurs and art writers of 17th-century France either. Just as the Duchy of Lorraine became extinct, falling under French rule for the first time in 1634 before being finally annexed in 1766, so La Tour, a barely tangible presence on the historical record (an agreement for the leasing of a grain store, a petition to the Duke of Lorraine in 1620 to be allowed to move to Lunéville, and a few apprentice contracts being almost the only traces), disappeared too: his paintings are the Cheshire Cat smile he left behind.

Some of the lacunae are now being examined in a major exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. ‘Georges de La Tour: From Shadow to Light’ seeks to flesh out the scant known facts about the painter and place him among his contemporaries. 

La Tour was born in Vic-sur-Seille in 1593, the second child of a prosperous baker, grain trader and property dealer. The town, which had grown wealthy through milling, tanneries, salt and agriculture, was part of the diocese of Metz, a French protectorate within the Duchy of Lorraine. The Duchy was itself an independent principality that straddled the trade and travel routes that connected  Flanders and the Dutch Republic to Italy. The staunchly Catholic Ducal court at Nancy was just 20 miles from Vic. 

Lorraine occupied a strategic position that gave it a degree of political heft and, pinched between a protestant Holy Roman Empire and an unsettled France – Henri IV, the Protestant king who converted to Catholicism was assassinated by a Catholic zealot in 1610 when La Tour was 17 – an important role in the Counter-Reformation. Nor was it an artistic backwater: La Tour’s contemporaries included both Claude Gellée (Claude Lorrain) and Jacques Callot. Frustratingly, one of the many gaps in La Tour’s biography is whether or not he ever met his eminent peers. 

Nor is there any real consensus as to where La Tour learned his skills. Two local painters, Claude Dogoz and Barthélemy Braun, are sometimes mentioned as potential teachers at Vic, although none of their work is definitively known. Meanwhile, at Nancy, the Mannerist artist Jacques Bellange, best known as an engraver but also a painter of night scenes, is another possibility.

Other ‘mights’ relate to the nature of La Tour’s Caravaggism. Where did he pick it up? In an 18th-century document he is described as élève du Guide but if indeed he did travel to Italy to study with Guido Reni it must have been before 1613, up to which point the passport application records were still incomplete. Although other Lorraine painters did travel south – Claude, Callot and Jean Le Clerc among them; the dukes of Lorraine had links with the Medici in Florence – there is no contemporary evidence that La Tour crossed the Alps. 

Anthony Blunt, on the other hand, thought he went to Utrecht in the early 1620s. It was there, Blunt claimed, that he encountered the work of a strong contingent of painters who had worked in Rome and knew Caravaggio’s work first-hand, notably Gerrit van Honthorst – Gherardo delle Notti (‘Gerard of the Nights’) – Hendrick ter Brugghen and Dirck van Baburen, while Theodoor Rombouts worked largely in Antwerp. Lorraine’s closeness to the Low Countries makes this feasible but again, there is no definitive evidence.

There was also a cluster of native French painters who brought back the new style; the Le Nain brothers, Valentin de Boulogne, Simon Vouet and the artist known as the Candlelight Master among them. Meanwhile, the Nancy painter Jean Le Clerc studied with Carlo Saraceni, the painter who produced an alternative version of The Death of the Virgin for Santa Maria della Scala in Rome when Caravaggio’s original, scandalous altarpiece was rejected in 1606. 

La Tour’s tenebrism, then, seems to have been adopted and adapted from genuine Caravaggisti rather than from the man himself. Indeed the French art historian Pierre Rosenberg has made a further distinction, calling him not a French Caravaggist but a French Caravaggio. The only painting by Caravaggio that La Tour would definitely have seen is the Annunciation that was given to Nancy Cathedral shortly after its foundation in 1609 by Henry II, Duke of Lorraine.

The two painters, however, did have subjects in common. The themes of gullibility and malign worldliness that Caravaggio explored in The Fortune Teller, c. 1594, and The Cardsharps of the same period were widely shared. La Tour was one of many painters to adopt them and his variations on the topics, two versions of a card cheat, Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds (both c. 1630–34), and The Fortune-Teller (c. 1630), were as likely inspired by print culture as Caravaggio’s paintings. 

Although there are only two known dated paintings from La Tour’s hand (Saint Peter Repentant, 1645, and Denial of Saint Peter, 1650), making a chronology difficult to establish, his genre scenes were a wider part of his established practice, whereas for Caravaggio they came early in his career as a stepping stone for his mature religious works. 

By the time La Tour painted The Fortune-Teller in the 1630s, a sumptuously coloured image of a young man being robbed by three young women as he has his fortune read by an elderly Roma woman, he had already produced a series of pared-back pictures of both religious figures and more enigmatic scenes from everyday life. And although the darting gazes, the careful narrative and the making of the viewer complicit in the drama are undoubtedly Caravaggesque, La Tour shows a far greater interest in the details of fabrics, the effects of colours and the psychology of an ensemble than the Italian did.

Such paintings were nevertheless rarities in La Tour’s work. By the time he painted them he had already begun to make character studies of humble people that would have been familiar to his contemporaries. Around 1620 he painted a series depicting Christ and the Twelve Apostles, commissioned for a religious building in Lorraine but sent to Albi Cathedral in the 1690s. These are essentially tronies – portrait heads of gnarled old men who have been turned into something divine: Saint James the Great has his pilgrim scallop shells, Saint Matthew his gospel, Saint Thomas holds the lance that pierced Christ’s side. It was the subscription campaign to buy this last painting for the Louvre in 1988 that fixed La Tour in the French consciousness as one of the country’s greatest artists. 

If the reason behind the creation of these pictures was clear (Lorraine was an important theological centre during the Counter-Reformation), the purpose of other paintings of humble figures is less certain. La Tour’s life-size The Hurdy-Gurdy Player with a Dog (c. 1622), for example, or a pair of paintings, Old Man and Old Woman (c. 1618–20), show an intense concentration on everyday life but to what end? He appears to treat the poor with respect (the elderly couple are of modest means but wear their best clothing), giving them monumentality and solemnity. These are not caricatures – contemporary theatrical characters and Callot’s etchings of beggars are much closer to that – but a reflection of the social fabric of Lorraine, perhaps showing the place of such folk with the most dignity he could.

La Tour himself was familiar enough with the higher strata of the world. He spent nearly two years in Paris from 1638 and was appointed peintre ordinaire du roi as recognition that he worked for the French king, and was given lodgings in the Louvre. Indeed, according to the historian Dom Calmet in 1751: ‘He presented to King Louis XIII a painting of his representing Saint Sebastian at night; this work was of such perfect taste that the king had all the other paintings removed from his room in order to leave only this one.’ The gift may have occurred during the king’s visit to Lorraine in 1632: La Tour pledged allegiance to the king in 1634.

Louis’s chief advisor Cardinal Richelieu was the owner of one of La Tour’s Saint Jeromes – probably the Stockholm version that contains a cardinal’s hat (Saint Jerome was traditionally the Church’s first cardinal). Meanwhile, in Lunéville he painted for the Dukes of Lorraine and from 1644 the city commissioned an annual painting from him as a New Year’s gift for the Marquis de La Ferté-Senneterre, the governor of Lorraine.

This exalted company had an effect on La Tour himself and he developed pretensions to nobility. In 1642, he refused to pay a tax on cattle, claiming the Duke of Lorraine had granted him exemption, and when an officer appeared at his house bearing a writ La Tour kicked him while screaming abuse at the unfortunate man. He was also said to be ‘odious to the people by the number of dogs he keeps, both greyhounds and spaniels, as if he were the local lord, hunting hares through the cultivated fields, trampling and spoiling them’. And in 1644 he leased a large property that had once belonged to the Order of St John of Jerusalem; this offered further exemptions from taxation. These traits are perhaps understandable in a man who knew precarity: in 1638, during the Thirty Years’ War, his house and studio in Lunéville were destroyed, alongside many of his paintings. 

What those paintings depicted is not known – apart from a head of Saint Peter, attributed preparatory drawings are missing from his oeuvre, as are any cartoons for the many replicas of his works he made himself or that emerged from his studio (he had at least five apprentices) under the supervision of his son Étienne. Since he largely worked for private patrons rather than the church there are few commissioning records either.

By 1638, however, he was established as what was known as a peintre de nuits. His intense, spiritual subjects such as The Repentant Magdalen (c. 1635–40) in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (one of five autograph treatments of the subject) and Christ with Saint Joseph in the Carpenter’s Shop (c. 1635–40) in the Louvre, reveal a painter of both immense skill at rendering the effects of a candle flame – translucent hands and sheets of paper, silhouettes and shadows, the glow and flicker of flames – but of a rare sensibility too. 

This combination of spirituality and aesthetics was grounded in an understanding of some of the theological thinking of the time. For example, the Cordeliers, a branch of the Franciscan order, were influential in Nancy and venerated the Virgin. Meanwhile, the mystical writings of the time, as well as the sermons of Father André de l’Auge delivered at the ducal court, were rich in the symbolism of light. Here was the contrast between spiritual darkness and divine illumination, with Mary herself described as the ‘light giver’ and ‘enlightened’ in the Golden Legend collection of hagiographies. The flame was a symbol of conversion, smoke a symbol of the renunciation of the mortal life, mirrors – an object that appears in many of his paintings – a reference to God ‘the infinitely radiant mirror’ and of man as reflection of divinity. It was La Tour’s particular gift to give potent visual form, based on an austere realism and piety, to such allusions.

Candlelight may be La Tour’s most distinctive motif but it is always paired with a stillness. This is another point of difference with Caravaggio, who never painted a candle flame and most of whose works are full of gestural drama. This stillness is what helps imbue his large non-religious paintings too, such as The Flea Catcher (1632–35) and The New-Born Child (c. 1645), with numinous overtones even though they depict prosaic subjects: the sacred and profane entwined in single, simple images. 

Candlelight and stillness were La Tour’s fate too. His own flame expired in 1652, a week after the death of his wife Diane, during a pleurisy epidemic in Lunéville. His long dark night was to last for more than 250 years before this most haunting of painters was brought back into the light.

‘Georges de La Tour: From Shadow to Light’ is at the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris, from 11 September–25 January 2026 (www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com). 

From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.