Georges de La Tour’s Bible Paintings: The Candle Painter Hidden Under Other Names

• Who: Georges de La Tour (1593–1652), a painter who worked in the duchy of Lorraine, then a state independent of France, best known for night scenes lit by a single candle or lamp.
• Baptised: 14 March 1593 at Vic-sur-Seille. The parish entry, as published, names his father Jean as a baker.
• Married: Diane Le Nerf in 1617, from a Lunéville family of the minor nobility.
• Worked: in Lunéville from about 1620. By 1646 at the latest he was styled peintre ordinaire du roi, one of the official painters of the king of France.
• Died: 30 January 1652 at Lunéville, about two weeks after his wife.
• Rediscovered: from 1915, when the German art historian Hermann Voss linked signed pictures in Nantes with archive documents published in the 1860s. In 1934 a Paris exhibition hung a dozen pictures under his name.
• How many: the list of works we follow, the French Wikipedia table that follows the list in Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Dimitri Salmon’s 1997 book and adds later finds, contains 49 surviving paintings; Christie’s put the number at “fewer than fifty” in 2021. Of those, 29 have Christian subjects: 26 are secure (firmly accepted as his) and 3 are still argued over.
• In this guide: our collection holds all 26 secure works, none of the 3 disputed ones, and 4 more that their owners label “workshop” or “studio” (made with or by his assistants) or “attributed to” (probably his, but not certain). Twenty-nine appear below: 25 of the secure works and those 4. The twenty-sixth, the Nantes Denial of Saint Peter, comes up in the text.
• Bible text: Berean Standard Bible (BSB). Where a picture shows a saint or a legend rather than a Bible scene, the verse is one we chose.

La Tour was baptised in Vic-sur-Seille, a small town in Lorraine, and then the record goes quiet for more than twenty years. No document says where or with whom he learned to paint. His pictures sometimes look as if he had seen Caravaggio’s work in Rome, but, as the Louvre notes, no document records such a trip. What the archives do show is a good marriage. In 1617 he wed Diane Le Nerf, from a Lunéville family of the minor nobility, and by 1621 he was a master painter with a household in her town.

The same archives are less flattering than the paintings. A Lunéville record mentions “wounds coming from blows of a stick” that he gave to a town officer who had come to collect dues, and a complaint from his later years accuses him of making himself odious to the people with the number of dogs he kept.

Charles Sterling, who wrote the 1934 catalogue that relaunched La Tour, summed him up as “a faithful disciple of Caravaggio, in his art and in his conduct.” Nothing documents what La Tour believed. The records do show the world he painted for: Lorraine was a Catholic duchy busy with religious orders, and in 1624 Duke Henri II ordered an image of Saint Peter from him for the Minims, an order of friars, at Lunéville.

In 1698 a church visitor at the cathedral of Albi, in southern France, recorded thirteen pictures in gilded frames: Christ and the twelve apostles. In 1795 a report described the twelve apostle pictures as having “a strong, darkened touch like that of Michelangelo da Caravaggio.” They were La Tour’s, painted in the early 1620s, probably for a church or monastery in Lorraine, and given to the cathedral in 1694.

The set was later broken up. Christie’s wrote in 2021 that only six of the original thirteen canvases are known to survive, and the six that the standard list counts as originals are all below. A seventh apostle, the Louvre’s Saint Thomas, was not part of any apostle series. The curator Philip Conisbee called La Tour’s apostles “men of flesh and blood,” not remote, glorious saints.

Saint James the Less (c. 1620)

The story: James son of Alphaeus, one of the twelve apostles Jesus chose in Galilee, is usually identified with the “James the younger” whose mother watched the crucifixion from a distance at Golgotha.

And there were also women watching from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome.

Mark 15:40 · BSB

His nickname rests on a single phrase in this verse, “the younger”; the King James Version calls him “James the less.” Otherwise the Gospels name him almost only in lists. La Tour gives him a pale, knotted wooden club instead of a book, the weapon later tradition says killed him. He is one of the two apostles in Albi that the standard list counts as La Tour’s own, in a museum named after Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the Albi-born painter of Paris dance halls.

Saint Jude Thaddeus (c. 1620)

The story: At the Last Supper in Jerusalem, the apostle Jude, called in John’s Gospel “Judas (not Iscariot),” asked Jesus why he would reveal himself to the disciples and not to the world.

Judas (not Iscariot) asked Him, “Lord, why are You going to reveal Yourself to us and not to the world?”

John 14:22 · BSB

He answers to three names: Thaddaeus in Matthew and Mark, Judas son of James in Luke and Acts, and “Judas (not Iscariot)” in John. Tradition treats them as one man, and this question is the only sentence any Gospel gives him. Jesus answered him with a promise: “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word. My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him” (John 14:23).

Saint Philip (c. 1625)

The story: After Jesus called him to follow, Philip of Bethsaida found Nathanael, told him they had found the one Moses wrote about, and answered Nathanael’s doubt about Nazareth with an invitation: “Come and see.”

“Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Nathanael asked. “Come and see,” said Philip.

John 1:46 · BSB

Philip’s cross is homemade: a rough crossbar lashed to the upright with cord, the loose ends hanging down. He doesn’t argue with Nathanael’s doubt; he invites him to look. According to the museum, the canvas was sold at the Paris auction house Drouot in 1941 and, after Paris and Swiss collections, reached the collector Walter P. Chrysler Jr. in 1975, two years before it entered his museum in Norfolk, Virginia.

Saint Andrew (early 1620s)

The story: At Bethany beyond the Jordan, Andrew, a disciple of John the Baptist, spent a day with Jesus and then went first to find his brother Simon Peter with the news that they had found the Messiah.

He first found his brother Simon and told him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated as Christ).

John 1:41 · BSB

Andrew is the apostle of introductions, and his portrait has needed a few. In the 1970s scholars knew the design only from a copy, catalogued it as a possible Saint Bartholomew and listed the original as lost. It surfaced at a sale in Monaco in 1991, after generations with a family near Albi, and sold at Christie’s in London on 8 July 2021 for £4,287,500. The beams of his traditional X-shaped cross stay in shadow behind him; the light goes to the book.

Saint Thomas (1620s)

The story: Eight days after Easter, in the room in Jerusalem where the disciples had gathered behind locked doors, Thomas saw the risen Jesus and answered, “My Lord and my God!”

Thomas replied, “My Lord and my God!”

John 20:28 · BSB

The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo doesn’t hedge: “It was only in 1987 that the existence of this painting became known.” It came out of a private collection in Albi, went through two Christie’s sales, in Monaco in 1991 and London in 1993, and reached Tokyo in 2003–04. Thomas grips a spear that the museum links both to his martyrdom and to the spear that pierced Christ’s side, the wound Thomas had said he must touch before he would believe.

Saint James the Greater (1620s)

The story: On the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus called the fisherman James son of Zebedee and his brother John from their father’s boat, and they left it at once to follow him.

Going on from there, He saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets. Jesus called them, and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed Him.

Matthew 4:21–22 · BSB

La Tour dresses the fisherman as one of his own future pilgrims: a broad hat with a scallop shell and two tiny pilgrim staffs on the brim, and more shells on his cape. The shell belongs to the medieval pilgrimage to his shrine at Santiago de Compostela in Spain, which is tradition rather than Scripture. Of his end the New Testament records only that King Herod had him put to death with the sword (Acts 12:2), the one apostle’s martyrdom it reports.

Saint Thomas with a Pike (c. 1634–1638)

The story: When Jesus decided to go back to Judea, where he had nearly been stoned, to raise his friend Lazarus at Bethany, the apostle Thomas told the other disciples, “Let us also go, so that we may die with Him.”

Then Thomas called Didymus said to his fellow disciples, “Let us also go, so that we may die with Him.”

John 11:16 · BSB

This is a different Thomas from the Tokyo one, and the Louvre’s record says so, describing the other Thomas, sold in Monte Carlo in 1991, as one of a series of apostles, “unlike the Louvre’s.” Signed at the upper right, it was bought in 1988 through a nationwide public appeal, helped by a bequest, gifts from companies, what the record calls very numerous individual donations and an exceptional contribution from the Ministry of Finance. We pair it with the line many readers forget: before Thomas doubted, his first words in John’s Gospel were about going to die with Jesus.

Saint Jerome, who died in 420, translated most of the Bible into Latin and became the patron saint of scholars. Painters dressed him as a cardinal, which he never was, and La Tour painted him both ways the tradition allowed: as the scholar in red and as the half-naked penitent. Our collection has five of these pictures, and they show how La Tour was lost and found.

Before the 1930s several of his daylight pictures of old men passed for Spanish, and it took a card cheat to give two saints back to him. As the 1934 catalogue tells it, a signed La Tour of a cheat at cards, owned by the collector Pierre Landry, let scholars return the Stockholm and Grenoble Jeromes to him.

Saint Jerome (c. 1621–23)

The story: Saint Jerome, the scholar who translated most of the Bible into Latin around AD 400, reads a letter with his spectacles held up in one hand, in the Royal Collection’s small canvas.

Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from Your law.

Psalm 119:18 · BSB

This is the “manner of Albert Durer” picture from the top of this article, and the Royal Collection Trust points out a detail most visitors miss. Jerome’s left eye is impaired, so he reads with his right eye through the left lens of his spectacles, which magnifies a few hairs of his beard. By 1697 the painting had moved from Whitehall to Kensington, which is how it escaped the great fire at Whitehall Palace in 1698. We paired it with the psalmist’s “Open my eyes,” a prayer for the kind of sight no pair of spectacles supplies.

Saint Jerome Reading a Letter

The story: In Madrid in 2005 a larger variant of the Royal Collection picture came to light: Saint Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, holding his spectacles as he studies a letter.

You yourselves are our letter, inscribed on our hearts, known and read by everyone. It is clear that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

2 Corinthians 3:2–3 · BSB

This one hid in an office. It was presented to the public on 3 June 2005, and that December the Instituto Cervantes reported that a La Tour had been “sleeping incognito” in its own Madrid headquarters, the Palacio de la Trinidad. It went on deposit at the Museo del Prado. The Royal Collection dates its own Jerome earlier and this “larger variant” to about 1627–29. The letter in his hands carries two small red marks like sealing wax and a line of script that cannot be read, the opposite of the letter Paul describes in our pairing, “known and read by everyone.”

Saint Jerome Reading (workshop)

The story: Saint Jerome reads a letter at night by a hidden candle, in a canvas from La Tour’s workshop that the Louvre has lent to the Musée lorrain in Nancy.

Make every effort to present yourself approved to God, an unashamed workman who accurately handles the word of truth.

2 Timothy 2:15 · BSB

It is signed “Latour fec.” (Latin shorthand for “made it”) at lower left, yet the Louvre, which owns it, catalogues it as the work of his workshop: a signature doesn’t settle who held the brush. The French state acquired it at an auction in Poitiers by pre-emption, its legal right to step in and buy at the final bid. In 2017–18 it hung in Geneva in an exhibition about translation, which suits the translators’ patron saint. For a picture the Louvre gives to the workshop, Paul’s “unashamed workman” seemed the right verse.

The Penitent Saint Jerome (Grenoble)

The story: In Grenoble’s canvas Saint Jerome, who spent years as a hermit in the desert before settling in Bethlehem, does penance with a bloodied rope scourge and a plain wooden cross.

When I kept silent, my bones became brittle from my groaning all day long.

Psalm 32:3 · BSB

Grenoble and Stockholm own near-twins of this composition. In 1934 Charles Sterling judged that they differed “even less” than La Tour’s two pictures of a blind hurdy-gurdy player. The easy difference to spot is the hat: Stockholm’s Jerome has his cardinal’s hat on the wall, and this one has none. The psalm we paired with it doesn’t stop at groaning: two verses later it says, “I acknowledged my sin to You … and You forgave the guilt of my sin.”

The Penitent Saint Jerome (Stockholm)

The story: With his red cardinal’s hat hanging on the wall behind him, Saint Jerome, the hermit-scholar later painted as a cardinal, kneels in penance in a canvas given to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm in 1917.

But whatever was gain to me I count as loss for the sake of Christ.

Philippians 3:7 · BSB

Stockholm’s 1928 catalogue gave it to the Spanish painter Juan Bautista Maíno. During the 1934 Paris exhibition the museum’s director, Axel Gauffin, having studied all the La Tours gathered there, announced that it would hang in Stockholm’s French rooms as a La Tour. Three years earlier Hermann Voss, the scholar who had begun La Tour’s rediscovery, had placed it in the wrong museum, Grenoble, which tells you how alike the twins are. We paired it with Paul’s “whatever was gain to me I count as loss,” because the grandest object in the picture, the cardinal’s hat, hangs on the wall behind him.

Job Mocked by His Wife (c. 1630)

The story: In the land of Uz, the ruined and diseased Job hears his wife tell him to curse God and die, and refuses: “Should we accept from God only good and not adversity?”

Then Job’s wife said to him, “Do you still retain your integrity? Curse God and die!” “You speak as a foolish woman speaks,” he told her. “Should we accept from God only good and not adversity?” In all this, Job did not sin in what he said.

Job 2:9–10 · BSB

For a century the museum wasn’t sure what this picture showed. It entered the museum in Épinal in 1829 and was inventoried in 1832 as anonymous, perhaps Spanish. Its usual title was “A woman visiting a prisoner,” and in 1929 the museum’s curator, André Philippe, kept it while admitting it was “given for want of another.” He added that La Tour “readily gives his religious pictures a secular air.”

In 1934 Sterling read it as the angel freeing Saint Peter from prison, “despite the unusual appearance of the angel, who has no wings.” By 1936 it was being discussed as Job and his wife, and Job it has stayed. The 1934 catalogue printed “not signed”; the museum now records a signature, “G. de La Tour fec,” at lower right.

In 1633 France occupied the duchy of Lorraine, and the decade brought armies, famine and epidemics. In 1638 Lunéville was burned. La Tour seems to have spent time in Paris around 1639, and by 1646 at the latest he was styled one of the king’s painters.

This is probably where the bedroom story belongs. In 1751 the Benedictine historian Dom Augustin Calmet wrote that the painter presented Louis XIII with a Saint Sebastian “in a night,” a picture of such perfect taste “that the King had all the other pictures removed from his bedchamber, to leave only that one.” Calmet is the only witness, writing more than a century later, and the same paragraph calls the painter Claude and says he was born in Lunéville, both wrong. The king’s picture is lost. For the rest of Sebastian’s legend, see our guide to Saint Sebastian’s life in art.

Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene (early 1630s, attributed)

The story: In the legend of Saint Sebastian, a Roman soldier left for dead under arrows for his faith, Irene finds him alive and, in this Fort Worth canvas, draws an arrow from his wound by lantern light.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.

Psalm 147:3 · BSB

The Kimbell Art Museum explains why this composition matters. Sebastian was invoked against the epidemics that plagued Lorraine, and La Tour’s versions of the scene “were by far the most copied of his works in the seventeenth century.” More than ten horizontal versions survive, and the Kimbell is candid about its own: “most scholars consider it to be a copy,” while others think La Tour may have painted it himself. It sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 1993 as “circle of La Tour,” so the museum’s “attributed to” is already a promotion. Psalm 147 says it is God who “binds up their wounds”; this design puts a woman’s hands to that work.

The Gospels tell us less about Mary Magdalene than painters do. She was a woman of Galilee “from whom seven demons had gone out” (Luke 8:2), she stood near the cross, and she was the first to meet the risen Jesus (John 20). Western tradition later merged her with the unnamed sinful woman who wept on Jesus’ feet in Luke 7 and with Mary of Bethany, and medieval legend gave her decades of penance as a hermit.

La Tour paints that legendary penitent, alone at night with a skull. The Louvre counts five versions of his penitent Magdalene; we have four, and each has its own trick of light. The chapter ends with a friar’s night vigil from Le Mans.

The Repentant Magdalen (c. 1635–40)

The story: Mary Magdalene, the Galilean disciple whom later tradition cast as a repentant sinner, sits at night before a mirror that reflects not her face but a skull, in La Tour’s canvas in Washington.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, yet our inner self is being renewed day by day.

2 Corinthians 4:16 · BSB

The mirror does double duty: a vanity glass turned into a reminder of death. The painting’s early history comes from an unlikely archive, a stencilled mark of the Haro family, Paris restorers, on the back of the wooden frame the canvas is stretched on, and an entry in their account book for 9 October 1877. It was shown in Paris in 1972 as “La Madeleine Fabius,” after its owner André Fabius, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington bought it in 1974. Paul’s “our inner self is being renewed day by day” is our pairing for a picture that puts mortality in the mirror.

The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (c. 1635–37)

The story: In La Tour’s Los Angeles canvas, Mary Magdalene, whom later legend imagined as a penitent hermit, sits at night with a skull in her lap beside the smoking flame of a glass oil lamp.

For You, O LORD, light my lamp; my God lights up my darkness.

Psalm 18:28 · BSB

For generations a family near Bordeaux owned this picture as a Le Nain, and it was “said to come from the eastern part of France,” which would fit La Tour’s Lorraine. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art calls it The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame and reads the flame as the real subject, connecting it with what followers of the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross called “the living flame of love.” That is the museum’s reading, not a documented intention of La Tour’s. Look for the thin wire holding the wick across the rim of the glass, and the single thread of smoke. This picture is also one of the five in our guide to healing from shame with Magdalene paintings.

The Penitent Magdalen (c. 1640)

The story: Before a mirror that turns one candle into two flames, Mary Magdalene, remembered in tradition as the great penitent, sits at night with her fingers laced over a skull, in La Tour’s canvas in New York.

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.

Psalm 119:105 · BSB

A string of pearls lies on the table and what look like pieces of jewellery lie on the floor, the luxuries the legend says she gave up. Mr and Mrs Charles Wrightsman gave the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978. Our pairing, “Your word is a lamp to my feet,” fits a picture built around a single light.

Magdalene with the Night Light (c. 1642–44)

The story: In a version the Louvre in Paris dates a few years after the Los Angeles picture, Mary Magdalene sits by a small night light with a skull on her knees.

On my bed at night I sought the one I love; I sought him, but did not find him.

Song of Solomon 3:1 · BSB

La Tour went back to the Los Angeles design: the Louvre found that he first painted her sleeve as it is in that picture, and notes that this version simplifies the drapery, softens the contrasts and darkens the composition. Reading the coarse robe tied with a cord and the still life on her table, Pierre Rosenberg and Jacques Thuillier wrote that “we are here, beyond doubt, closest to the Franciscan spirit”; the friars of Saint Francis wear a knotted cord.

Its twentieth century was not quiet: in 1941 it passed against its owner’s will to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, in 1944 it was confiscated for the French customs administration, and in 1949 the Louvre bought it from the customs. The Song of Songs (also called the Song of Solomon) is one of the two first readings offered at Mass on Mary Magdalene’s feast day, 22 July; its night search for “the one I love” is our pairing.

The Ecstasy of Saint Francis (1640–45, attributed)

The story: By the light of a screened candle, a friar prays beside Saint Francis of Assisi, who leans far back in ecstasy, in a night scene that the museum in Le Mans attributes to La Tour.

From now on let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.

Galatians 6:17 · BSB

The museum’s record keeps both of the picture’s lives: “Ecstasy of Saint Francis,” formerly “a monk praying beside a dying monk.” In 1932 Le Mans catalogued it as Spanish; today the museum’s record says “attributed to” La Tour, and it notes a replica in a private collection. Paul’s “marks of Jesus” is our pairing for a saint famous for his stigmata, though none is visible here.

By 1644 La Tour was back in Lunéville, and in these years he painted Saint Joseph several times. The Louvre ties this to the religious mood of the time: as the historian Émile Mâle pointed out in 1932, renewed devotion to Saint Joseph was one of the marks of the Catholic Reformation, the Catholic Church’s renewal after the Protestant Reformation. In these pictures Joseph is an old man beside a single flame: an angel painted as a girl reaches toward him as he sleeps, a boy holds the candle while he works, and at the birth he shields the candle himself.

The Dream of Saint Joseph

The story: An angel of the Lord appears to the sleeping Joseph in La Tour’s Nantes canvas, which does not say which of Joseph’s dreams in Matthew’s Gospel it shows, so we pair it with the first, about Mary’s child.

But after he had pondered these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to embrace Mary as your wife, for the One conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a Son, and you are to give Him the name Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins.”

Matthew 1:20–21 · BSB

Nantes owned this signed picture from 1810 and, in its 1854 catalogue, gave it to Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, the eighteenth-century pastel portraitist. Until 1915 its title said only “An old man asleep and woken by a girl.” Hermann Voss recognised the subject and, with the Nantes Denial of Saint Peter and the Rennes Newborn, used it to start putting Georges de La Tour’s name back on his pictures. The angel has no wings, and Sterling wrote that La Tour “turned simple Lorraine servant girls into angels,” adding that few artists had shown such contempt for the traditional ways of picturing sacred subjects.

Saint Joseph the Carpenter (c. 1642–44)

The story: In Nazareth, where the boy Jesus grew up obedient to Mary and Joseph, La Tour imagines Joseph bent over a beam with an auger at night while the child holds the candle.

Then He went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But His mother treasured up all these things in her heart.

Luke 2:51 · BSB

Others had painted the scene before him: the Louvre notes that Gerrit van Honthorst showed Joseph at work by the light of the Christ Child at least three times in Rome in the 1610s. (Two centuries later Millais painted a very different carpenter’s shop; see our guide to Millais’s Bible paintings.) La Tour strips the scene down to two figures and one flame, and the museum points to the contrast between the old man’s powerful hands and the boy’s fingers, “made almost transparent by the flame.” An X-ray found another face painted under the child’s, which the Louvre compares with Irene’s in the lantern Sebastian (the Kimbell picture above); the conservator Élisabeth Martin concluded that a different picture was begun on this canvas and abandoned.

In 1938 the London collector Percy Moore Turner tried without success to sell the painting to the National Gallery in London. Ten years later he gave it to the Louvre in memory of Paul Jamot, the curator who had first published it and had written the preface to the 1934 exhibition. Of those years in Nazareth Luke says that the boy “was obedient to them”; La Tour imagines what that looked like on a working night, with the child holding the light for Joseph.

The Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1644)

The story: On the night of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem the shepherds come to see the newborn, and La Tour has them bring a lamb, while Mary prays and Joseph holds the only candle.

The true Light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.

John 1:9 · BSB

The picture surfaced on the art market in the mid-1920s, labelled a Honthorst in Amsterdam. Hermann Voss gave it back to La Tour in 1926, and that year the Louvre bought it from the art historian Vitale Bloch, the first La Tour the Louvre ever acquired. Twenty-one years later Bloch would give Charles II’s Jerome back to La Tour too. The picture has often been identified with the “Nativity of Our Lord” that Lunéville gave the governor in 1644, though the museum says doubt remains.

The canvas has been cut down at the right and especially at the bottom, and a copy in Albi shows its original format, with Joseph’s carpenter’s tools on the floor below the sleeping child: this Nativity was also a picture about Joseph. He shields the flame with his hand, so the light reaches the child only indirectly, and the Louvre reads that through the spirituality of La Tour’s time: Joseph as the man who sheltered the hidden Word of God through Christ’s childhood, as he shelters the candle. Our pairing, John 1:9, calls the child “the true Light.”

The four pictures in this chapter are domestic: women, a baby or a child, and one flame. The first is the picture a Washington curator called Rennes’s Mona Lisa, and scholars still debate what it shows.

The Newborn

The story: In Bethlehem Mary gives birth to her firstborn son and wraps him in swaddling cloths, which is how La Tour’s Rennes canvas is usually read, with an older woman, often called Saint Anne, shading the candle.

And she gave birth to her firstborn, a Son. She wrapped Him in swaddling cloths and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

Luke 2:7 · BSB

Is it even the Nativity? There is no manger, halo, angel or Joseph, only a young mother, a swaddled baby and an older woman whose raised hand hides the flame. The 1934 catalogue hedged with the title Le Nouveau-né (La Nativité ?), “The Newborn (The Nativity?).” In the eighteenth century the picture belonged to the Robien collection as a work by the Dutch candlelight painter Godfried Schalcken; later it was a Le Nain, then the work of an unknown Frenchman, until Voss gave it to La Tour in 1915.

Sterling called it “the masterpiece of G. de la Tour’s night pictures.” When the curator Philip Conisbee asked to borrow it for the 1996 Washington exhibition, he explained the Rennes museum’s reluctance in four words: “It’s their Mona Lisa.” According to the Smithsonian, he won the loan by offering a Gauguin of Breton girls in exchange. If it is the Nativity, La Tour kept half of the sign the angel gave the shepherds, “a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths,” and left out the manger.

Saint Anne with the Infant Jesus (c. 1645–50)

The story: Saint Anne, in Christian tradition the mother of the Virgin Mary, holds a candle beside a swaddled baby whom the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto identifies as her grandson, the infant Jesus.

Grandchildren are the crown of the aged, and the glory of a son is his father.

Proverbs 17:6 · BSB

Unlike the Rennes canvas, this one keeps the flame in full view, right beside the baby’s cheek. Toronto calls him the infant Jesus; a French list also calls the picture Saint Anne with the swaddled Virgin, and the picture itself does not settle it. It came to Toronto in 1991 as an anonymous bequest. The proverb we paired with it, about grandchildren as a crown, fits the museum’s reading.

The Education of the Virgin (c. 1650, studio)

The story: In a canvas at the Frick Collection in New York, Saint Anne, by tradition the mother of the Virgin Mary, teaches her young daughter by candlelight, the child holding the light for the open book on her mother’s lap.

From infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

2 Timothy 3:15 · BSB

Even its owner hedges. The Frick Collection catalogues it as “Studio of Georges de La Tour” and says that “the authorship of this painting has been much debated.” In 1996 the Smithsonian reported that the Frick’s label suggested his son Étienne. La Tour did run a workshop: a notarial register records his agreement to teach his art to the son of a Lunéville man named Nardoyen, and in 1649, as the next chapter shows, the town put “father and son” at the table to agree a price. Paul’s line about knowing the Scriptures “from infancy” is our pairing for a reading lesson.

Young Virgin Mary (c. 1640)

The story: A young girl, traditionally read as the Virgin Mary at her lessons with her mother Saint Anne, raises her hand before a candle, in a canvas in Detroit that appears to be a fragment of a larger picture.

The unfolding of Your words gives light; it informs the simple.

Psalm 119:130 · BSB

A girl, a hidden flame and a basket fill the surviving canvas; at the right edge other forms run out of view. It is a separate work from the Frick picture. If it was cut from a larger reading lesson, the rest of that lesson is now missing; the psalm we paired with it promises, “The unfolding of Your words gives light.”

In occupied Lorraine La Tour became Lunéville’s regular painter, and the town council used his pictures as gifts for the French governor. In 1644 it paid 700 francs for “a Nativity of Our Lord, given as a gift and present to the Governor of Nancy.” In 1649 it paid 700 francs for a Saint Sebastian, plus 6 francs to the painter’s daughter “in connection with the said picture,” and a dinner with La Tour “father and son” to settle the price.

In the accounts for 1651 the town still owed 600 francs “to the late Sieur Georges de La Tour” for a Denial of Saint Peter given to Marshal de La Ferté: he had died before the bill was settled. Charles Sterling thought it “infinitely probable” that this is the canvas in Nantes dated 1650, which we discuss in our guide to Peter’s denial in art.

La Tour died at Lunéville on 30 January 1652, about two weeks after his wife Diane; the record gives pleurisy.

Saint Peter Repentant (1645)

The story: After denying Jesus three times in the high priest’s courtyard in Jerusalem, Peter hears the rooster crow, remembers Jesus’ warning and weeps bitterly.

Then Peter remembered the word that Jesus had spoken: “Before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times.” And he went outside and wept bitterly.

Matthew 26:75 · BSB

The rooster of Jesus’ warning sits on the ledge beside him. This is one of the few La Tours with a date painted on it, at upper right: “Georgs delaTour Invet et Pin / 1645,” Latin shorthand for “designed and painted.” When Paris rediscovered La Tour in 1934, only one dated painting of his was known, the 1650 Denial. This one was then sitting unrecognised with the heirs of an English clergyman, the Rev. William Lucas Chafy, in Bath, and it reached the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1951.

Cleveland’s label reads him as caught “in a state of perpetual repentance.” The Gospels do not leave Peter there: after the resurrection Jesus asks him three times, “Simon son of John, do you love Me?” (John 21:15–17).

Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene (c. 1649)

The story: After the Roman soldier Sebastian was shot with arrows for his Christian faith and left for dead, Irene kneels by torchlight, holding his hand, with three other women around them.

We are hard pressed on all sides, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.

2 Corinthians 4:8–9 · BSB

This version was discovered in 1945 by Jean Philippot in the parish church of Bois-Anzeray, a village in Normandy. A second version in Berlin, once catalogued as a Vermeer, was the one shown as La Tour’s in 1934. In 1972 the two were hung side by side and examined in the laboratory, and the Louvre’s proved the original, partly because its central woman’s veil uses lapis lazuli, a costly blue the Berlin copy lacks.

Was this the Saint Sebastian Lunéville paid for in 1649? The Louvre calls the idea uncertain. If its dating of about 1649 is right, it came too late to be the king’s picture from Calmet’s story: Louis XIII died in 1643. Paul’s “struck down, but not destroyed” is our pairing because it is the legend’s plot: Sebastian survives the arrows.

Saint John the Baptist in the Desert

The story: Before he began preaching by the Jordan, John the Baptist lived in the wilderness, and La Tour shows him there with a slender cross-staff and a lamb.

And the child grew and became strong in spirit; and he lived in the wilderness until the time of his public appearance to Israel.

Luke 1:80 · BSB

Unknown to the 1934 exhibition, it was spotted at a Paris auction in 1993, according to the Smithsonian. The state pre-empted it on behalf of the Moselle département, the local authority, and since 2003 it has hung in Vic-sur-Seille, the town where La Tour was baptised, in a museum named after him. There’s no halo; a thin cross-staff and a lamb do all the identifying. It is usually dated late in his career, though the Louvre’s record says only “17th century.” Luke gives those wilderness years a single verse; La Tour gives them a whole canvas.

La Tour’s name never quite died. Around 1673 a French collector’s verse list of painters still placed “la Tour” among the glories of Lorraine, and Calmet wrote his garbled paragraph in 1751. What disappeared was the link between the name and the pictures. In the 1860s Alexandre Joly, an architect in Nancy, published a pamphlet full of documents about the painter but admitted he knew none of his works. In 1913 the Nantes catalogue named an unknown seventeenth-century “G. Delatour,” and in 1915 Hermann Voss put the documents and the signed Nantes pictures together.

The breakthrough with the public came in November 1934, when the Orangerie in Paris opened Les Peintres de la réalité en France au XVIIe siècle (Painters of Reality in Seventeenth-Century France) with a dozen pictures under his name. Sterling’s catalogue introduced him as “naguère inconnu,” until recently unknown, and could not yet say where or when he was born. Then came the first solo exhibition in Paris in 1972, the Washington and Fort Worth exhibition of 1996, a Paris retrospective in 1997 and another at the Musée Jacquemart-André in 2025–26. In 1996 Conisbee summed up the turnaround: “In France, La Tour is a national icon.”

“Louis XIII loved his Saint Sebastian so much that he cleared every other picture from his bedroom.” Possibly, but only one writer says so: Calmet, in 1751, more than a century after the event. He gives no source, and he gets the painter’s first name and birthplace wrong. The picture is lost, and neither of the Sebastians above has been identified with it.

“His saints never have halos, wings or crosses.” Halos and wings are rare, but crosses are not: both penitent Jeromes and John the Baptist hold one, Philip carries one against his shoulder, and the beams of Andrew’s traditional X-shaped cross sit in the shadows behind him. The missing wings are real, though, as the Nantes Dream shows.

“He painted by candlelight.” No document describes how he worked. Calmet says he “excelled in night pictures,” which describes his subjects, not his studio lamps.

“His wife or daughter modelled for the Magdalenes.” We found no evidence. The only document that comes close is the 1649 town payment of 6 francs to his daughter “in connection with” a Saint Sebastian, which Sterling guessed was for posing.

“He trained in Italy.” Unknown. No document records his training, and scholars have argued for Italy, the Netherlands and Lorraine alone.

“He was forgotten for three hundred years.” Half true. His name survived in Lorraine’s local histories, while his pictures went on under other painters’ names; they came back to him one at a time, from Voss’s first identifications in 1915 to Charles II’s Jerome in 1947.

“He died of the plague.” The record says pleurisy. His wife died about two weeks before him and, according to modern accounts, a servant within days, which suggests an epidemic but does not prove one.

“The Denial of Saint Peter is his only dated painting.” That was true of what was known in 1934. The Cleveland Saint Peter, dated 1645, turned up in 1951, and a handful of others carry dates too.

Visio Divina (Latin for “divine seeing”) is a way of praying with an image, modelled on lectio divina (“divine reading”), the old monastic way of praying slowly through Scripture. Read our introduction to Visio Divina, or try it now with The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (c. 1635–37).

1. Look. Stay with the picture for a minute before you think about it. Let your eye go where it wants, then notice where the light comes from.
2. Meditate. Read Psalm 18:28 slowly: “For You, O LORD, light my lamp; my God lights up my darkness.” What is the dark room in your own life right now?
3. Pray. Tell God plainly what you are sitting with today, and ask him to light your lamp.
4. Contemplate. Sit quietly with who does the lighting in this verse: “You, O LORD, light my lamp.”

Who was Georges de La Tour?

Georges de La Tour (1593–1652) was a painter who worked in the duchy of Lorraine, then independent of France, mostly in Lunéville, and by 1646 he was styled one of the official painters of the king of France. He is famous for quiet night scenes lit by a single candle or lamp. After his death his paintings were credited to other artists until twentieth-century scholars, starting with the German art historian Hermann Voss in 1915, reconnected them with his name.

What is Georges de La Tour famous for?

Georges de La Tour is famous for candlelit night scenes, especially The Newborn in Rennes, Saint Joseph the Carpenter and The Adoration of the Shepherds in the Louvre, and his penitent Magdalenes. He also painted daylight scenes of everyday life, such as The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds and The Fortune-Teller.

Why are Georges de La Tour’s paintings lit by candlelight?

Georges de La Tour left no explanation, but many of his best-known pictures are night scenes lit by one candle or lamp, a fashion among painters who followed Caravaggio, such as Gerrit van Honthorst. The earliest biographical notice of him, by Dom Calmet in 1751, says he “excelled in night pictures.” La Tour made the fashion his own: in pictures like Saint Joseph the Carpenter or The Newborn a single flame turns an everyday room into a religious scene.

How many religious paintings did Georges de La Tour paint?

Of the 49 surviving paintings in the list we follow (the French Wikipedia table, based on the list in Jean-Pierre Cuzin and Dimitri Salmon’s 1997 book plus later finds), 29 have Christian subjects: 26 secure and 3 still disputed. Many more are known only from copies or documents. Our collection holds all 26 secure religious works, plus 4 that their owners catalogue as workshop, studio or attributed pictures.

What does La Tour’s Magdalene with the Smoking Flame mean?

The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) shows Mary Magdalene as later legend imagined her: a penitent alone at night with a skull, books, a cross and a scourge. The skull is a traditional reminder of death, and the museum reads the flame itself as the true subject, connecting it with what followers of Saint John of the Cross called “the living flame of love.” That is the museum’s reading; La Tour left no explanation.

Was Georges de La Tour religious?

Georges de La Tour was a Catholic in a Catholic duchy, and most of his surviving paintings have religious subjects. He left no letters or writings about his faith, though, and the town records show a prosperous and quarrelsome townsman. What we can say is that some of his pictures were made for religious houses (in 1624 Duke Henri II ordered a Saint Peter from him for the Minim friars of Lunéville), and that his saints are painted with unusual stillness and seriousness.

Where can I see Georges de La Tour’s paintings?

Georges de La Tour’s paintings in this guide are in museums in France, the United States and beyond: France: the Louvre in Paris; the museums of Nantes, Rennes, Grenoble, Épinal, Le Mans, Nancy and Albi; and the Musée départemental Georges de La Tour in Vic-sur-Seille. United States: the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth; and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. Elsewhere: the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Royal Collection in Britain and, on deposit, the Prado in Madrid. Two are privately owned. Check that a work is on view before you travel.

How was Georges de La Tour rediscovered?

Georges de La Tour’s name survived in Lorraine’s local histories, but his pictures were attributed to other painters for more than two centuries. In the 1860s Alexandre Joly published documents about his life without knowing any of his works. In 1915 Hermann Voss linked those documents with signed paintings in Nantes and the Rennes Newborn, and the 1934 Paris exhibition Les Peintres de la réalité introduced him to the public.

Every painting in this guide has a playable puzzle. Use the link beneath each picture, or start with one of these three:

• The Penitent Magdalen (The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame)
• Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene (Louvre)
• Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene (Kimbell, attributed)

For more art, Scripture and reflection, get the app. If La Tour’s candles have caught you, meet the painter whose followers made night scenes the fashion: Caravaggio’s Bible paintings.