Art: An Analytical Stillness

A candle flame, streaming upward from its stubby pillar of wax, was one of the favorite images in 17th century European art. Vulnerable to a breath, shedding its modest light and resolving the threats of darkness into rational form, it became a metaphor of human consciousness itself. Indeed, a tradition of the "night piece" runs back to the late 15th century, when Leonardo set down his precepts for painting dramatic firelit groups. Rembrandt in Holland and Caravaggio in Rome produced unforgettable examples of the genre. But the artist whose work is most intimately associated with candlelight was Frenchman: Georges de La Tour.

Great painters, one tends to suppose, may go in and out of fashion, but they do not get lost, like suitcases. Yet this was La Tour's fate. His work lay in limbo for nearly 300 years; by 1900 he was a name and three paintings, no more, and the patient labor of art scholars over the past few decades has unearthed only 31 of his pictures, plus various fragments and copies. This must be only a fraction of his output. Throughout this summer, however, the definitive La Tour exhibition is on view at the Orangerie in Paris. Returned to the light, La Tour's work can be seen as one of the marvels of French art.

Odious. About La Tour's life and character, very little is known. The man is faceless—the more so, because he left no known self-portrait; it is just possible that the quick-eyed, copper-haired young cheat at the right in The Cardsharp with the Ace of Diamonds may be La Tour himself. But his life is mostly conjecture, strung between a few documentary signposts. He was born in 1593, at Vic, a town in the duchy of Lorraine. At some time between 1610 and 1616, he is assumed to have gone to Italy and worked in Rome. By 1617 he was back in France, marrying the daughter of a prosperous ducal silversmith, Diane Le Nerf. The marriage paid well in contacts and commissions. In 1620 La Tour moved to Lunéville, his wife's town, and begged the Duke of Lorraine for tax exemption—"since nobody of the petitioner's art and profession lives there, or in the region." The duke granted this, from which one may suppose that the 27-year-old artist already had a burgeoning reputation.

La Tour was to spend the rest his life in Lunéville, surviving the plague and the Thirty Years' War and growing steadily rich. His tax exemption fattened him, and the poorer citizens of Lunéville resented it; in 1646 they besought the duke to tax everyone equally for war, including "the painter M. Georges de La Tour," who "makes himself odious to the people by the number of dogs he keeps ... as though he were lord of the place, coursing his greyhounds through the corn, spoiling and trampling it." Apparently La Tour remained a crusty squire to the end: in 1650, two years before his death at 59, he thrashed a peasant with such spryness that a doctor had to be called.