La Tour, Georges de (1593–1652). French painter, active at Lunéville in the Duchy of Lorraine. He had a successful career (his paintings were owned by Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, and the Duke of Lorraine), but his name sank into oblivion after his death and it was not until the 20th century that he was rediscovered and hailed as the most inspired of
Caravaggesque painters. Little is recorded of his life (although he is known to have been arrogant and unpopular with his neighbours) and it is a matter of dispute whether he gained his knowledge of Caravaggio's style via painters of the Utrecht School such as
Honthorst or by travelling to Italy. Like Honthorst he is particularly associated with nocturnal scenes and with the use of a candle as the light source in a painting. La Tour's handling of light is more subtle and sensitive, however, and he is grander in conception and more sombre in mood. In his mature work he smoothed the forms of his figures until they approached geometric simplicity and achieved a feeling of monumental stillness that is considered to represent the spirit of 17th-century French
classicism no less than the paintings of
Philippe de Champaigne and
Poussin in their different fields. Only three of La Tour's paintings are dated—the
Payment of Dues (1634?, Picture Gal., Lviv, Ukraine);
Penitent St Peter (1645, Cleveland Mus. of Art); the
Denial of St Peter (1650, Mus. B.-A., Nantes)—and there is much scholarly debate about his chronology. The works associated with the beginning of his career are daylit scenes of such subjects as peasants and card-sharpers; they are very different in spirit from the calm and majestic religious images of his maturity and have become controversial as regards attribution as well as dating. It has been argued (and hotly disputed) that the
Fortune Teller (Met. Mus., New York) is a modern fake, and although the status of most of the other early works as authentic (and high-quality) 17th-century French paintings is not denied, their attribution to La Tour (which rests almost entirely on stylistic evidence) has been questioned. Another problem in La Tour studies is that many of his undeniably authentic compositions exist in more than one version, and the studio replicas (as they appear to be) are sometimes of extremely high quality; the versions of
St Sebastian Tended by St Irene in the Louvre, Paris, and the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, for example, are each extraordinarily beautiful. La Tour's son
Étienne (1621–92) worked in his father's studio and may have been responsible for some of the replicas. No independent works certainly by him are known, but the
Education of the Virgin (Frick Coll., New York), signed ‘de la Tour’, has been attributed to him.
