Appendix IV

 

Painter in ordinary first to the Duke of his native Lorraine and later to the King of France, Georges de La Tour was treated, during his lifetime, as the great artist he so manifestly was.  With the accession of Louis XIV and the rise, the deliberate cultivation, of a new Art of Versailles, aristocratic subject-matter and lucidly classical in style, the reputation of this once-famous man suffered an eclipse so complete that, within a couple of generations, his very name had been forgotten, and his surviving paintings came to be attributed to the Le Nains, to Honthorst, to Zurbarán, to Murillo, even to Velasquez.  The rediscovery of La Tour began in 1915 and was virtually complete by 1934, when the Louvre organized a notable exhibition of 'The Painters of Reality'.  Ignored for nearly three hundred years, one of the greatest of French painters had come back to claim his rights.

      George de La Tour was one of those extroverted visionaries, whose art faithfully reflects certain aspects of the outer world, but reflects them in a state of transfigurement, so that every meanest particular becomes intrinsically significant, a manifestation of the absolute.  Most of his compositions are of figures seen by the light of a single candle.  A single candle, as Caravaggio and the Spaniards had shown, can give rise to the most enormous theatrical effects.  But La Tour took no interest in theatrical effects.  There is nothing dramatic in his pictures, nothing tragic or pathetic or grotesque, no representation of action, no appeal to the sort of emotions which people go to the theatre to have excited and then appeased.  His personages are essentially static.  They never do anything; they are simply there in the same way in which a granite Pharaoh is there, or a Bodhisattva from Khmer, or one of Piero's flat-footed angels.  And the single candle is used, in every case, to stress the intense but unexcited, impersonal thereness.  By exhibiting common things in an uncommon light, its flame makes manifest the living mystery and inexplicable marvel of mere existence.  There is so little religiosity in the paintings that in many cases it is impossible to decide whether we are confronted by an illustration to the Bible or a study of models by candlelight.  Is the 'Nativity' at Rennes the nativity, or merely a nativity?  Is the picture of an old man asleep under the eyes of a young girl merely that?  Or is it of St Peter in prison being visited by the delivering angel?  There is no way of telling.  But though La Tour's art is wholly without religiosity, it remains profoundly religious, in the sense that it reveals, with unexampled intensity, the divine omnipresence.

      It must be added that, as a man, this great painter of God's immanence seems to have been proud, hard, intolerably overbearing, and avaricious.  Which goes to show, yet once more, that there is never a one-to-one correspondence between an artist's work and his character.