At Musée Jacquemart-André, Georges de La Tour’s Light Shines Brightly

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1582214" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/Georges-de-La-Tour-The-Newborn-Child-c.-1647-1648-oil-on-canvas-76.7-x-95.5-cm-Rennes-Musee-des-beaux-arts-%C3%82%C2%A9-Rennes-Musee-des-beaux-arts.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A softly lit painting by Georges de La Tour shows two women gazing in reverence at a swaddled infant glowing with radiant light, evoking a nativity scene without overt religious symbols.” width=”970″ height=”800″ data-caption=’Georges de La Tour, <em>The New-born</em>, c. 1645. Oil on canvas, 76.7 x 95.5 cm., Rennes, Musée des beaux-arts. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>© Photo RMN – L. Deschamps</span>’>

Today, the blue light emitted by smartphones in the dark is, sadly, the closest contemporary equivalent to a candlelit glow. But centuries ago, the hauntingly beautiful paintings of Georges de La Tour evoked an otherworldly luminescence that remains spellbinding to behold today. The Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris is currently exhibiting the spectacular work of the 17th-century French painter often equated with Caravaggio (also exhibited at the museum in 2018), though he is very much his own icon.

“From Shadow to Light,” a not-quite-retrospective, will be the first devoted to the artist in France since an exhibition at the Grand Palais in 1997. Bringing together around thirty paintings and graphic works, the exhibition pulls thematic threads, partly motivated by the fact that scholars contest the chronology of La Tour’s work. The earliest painting today dates from 1645—less than ten years before his death—and his preceding output is only partially known through historical records and inventories.

La Tour (1593-1652) was incredibly successful in his own time, painting for elite patrons and collectors, including the Dukes of Lorraine, Cardinal Richelieu and even King Louis XIII. Despite this flourishing, La Tour fell off the radar after his death in 1652, and it was not until the early 20th Century that art historians rediscovered and championed his work. Gail Feigenbaum, co-curator of “From Shadow to Light” with Pierre Curie, notes there are “decades with no information” about the painter’s work. “The facts with La Tour are really slippery,” she admitted, by virtue of only having access to—at best—a quarter of his extant work.

To fill out the exhibition, comparative works by contemporaries of La Tour, including work he likely saw and might have been influenced by—or sometimes the inverse, the timelines being difficult to retrace—situate the painter in a wider artistic era. While La Tour’s chosen themes were recurrent within this time, his gently somber stylization is uniquely his own. He didn’t invent the concealed candle trope, but his effervescent glow is unparalleled. With him, light is not a vehicle to brighten a scene but “becomes the true subject of the painting,” the wall text notes.

In the first room, L’argent Versé by La Tour evokes a tense scene with six candlelit figures congregating around a table on which coins and a basket of money act as a centripetal force to their antsy gestures and heavy leaning. Juxtaposed across the way is a painting by Jean Le Clerc, whose Concert nocturne features an animated tavern in which musicians and lovers cavort around a candlelit table, each absorbed in their own interactions: amorously or worriedly. The sense of group dynamic in each is rousing and curious.

In the next room, La Tour’s paintings feature subjects who are old, blind or poor, but they are depicted, per the wall text, “without judgement or sentimentality.” Les Mangeurs de Pois is a close-up of two elders eating peas with their hands from bowls: the woman’s mouth hanging agape, the man’s eyes narrowed in hunger. The wall text marvels at the “radical realism” of these subjects, which neither elevates nor denigrates. The painting is hung alongside a duo by Pensionante del Saraceni, Le Reniement de Saint Pierre, in which two figures are visibly arguing, their hands animated and mouths open in apparent protest. The sense of agitation in the latter only highlights the ascetic calm of La Tour’s pair.

In the next room are two paintings of Saint Jérôme Penitent, with evident variations. This multiplicity of a single work reflects the eager demand for La Tour’s output and the painter’s willing compliance to meet the desires of his patrons. In both works, Saint Jérôme clutches a cross, with a bloody scourge and a book at his feet. One painting, however, is adorned with a Cowboy Carter-style scarlet hat (actually intended for Cardinal Richelieu and probably a courtly gift, intended as bait to bankroll future patronage). Feigenbaum pointed out that the second version is “not a rote copy” and that it is startling to see saggy skin, a visible bunion and naturalist detail. It’s an unusual choice, given that “painters idealize bodies much more than this.”

After moving through a room dedicated to apostles—including the only loan from the Louvre of Saint Thomas (the museum has six La Tour paintings, but five are in unstable condition)—the next highlights how “La Tour is really a poet of the candle flame,” per Feigenbaum. The painting Saint Jérôme Lisant, attributed to La Tour’s atelier, depicts an incredibly minute but beautiful detail: a tiny rip in the page the saint is reading allows the candlelight behind it to shine through. (For any skeptics of an “atelier of” painting rather than by the painter himself, Feigenbaum posited that anything done in La Tour’s atelier would have been under his supervision and maybe even involved his own hand. “They would both be expensive and desirable,” she noted of the impeccable quality of artistic labor.) La Tour’s painting of younger Saint Jérôme is likened to that of a much older iteration, also reading by candlelight, by French painter Trophime Bigot. Bigot was one of many artists who studied in Italy and brought a Caravaggio-esque style back to his native country, much like painters from Spain, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Copies of Caravaggio were “what was circulating around Europe,” Feigenbaum stated.

On the way to the two final rooms are beautiful etchings by Jacques Callot, showcasing two “nocturnes” by the printmaker. It is unclear who came first, Callot or La Tour, because the chronology is muddled. These etchings face a gorgeously smoldering scene in La découverte du corps de Saint Alexis, from La Tour’s atelier: one figure in repose, the other delicately examining the silhouette with a firebrand in hand.

The penultimate room compares the “theatricality, sensationalism and operatic swoon” of baroque stylings to La Tour’s “more realistic and domesticated behavior,” Feigenbaum explained. La Tour’s La Madeleine penitent—in which a skull blocks the flame but bathes the figure in contemplative warmth—is worlds away from the neighboring painting La Madeleine en extase by Louis Finson. La Tour’s version is interiorized and restrained relative to the aggressive physicality of Finson’s subject. “He tells a story differently: much more quietly,” Feigenbaum noted of La Tour. “It’s more of a stillness.” Nearby hangs the image selected for the museum catalogue cover, Le Nouveau-né, showing two figures huddling over a baby “glowing like a source of light.” Feigenbaum pointed out that La Tour has imbued the tableau with an “intrinsic holiness” that brings to mind the classic nativity scene—but without any overt signifiers, thus reflecting an ambiguity and, as such, a daring.

The final room includes the gorgeous oil on canvas Le Souffleur à la pipe—one of the few works dated (1646) and signed—with a figure similar to La découverte du corps de Saint Alexis, whose cheeks slightly puff to maintain a radiant firebrand. This boy’s sense of purpose is at the inverse end of the spectrum to the painting across the room, Saint Jean-Baptiste dans le désert. Candle-free, it features a lanky adolescent in an austere setting who, Feigenbaum remarked, “looks like a kid who’s just really, really depressed.” It’s an amusing painting to end on: the figures in paintings from centuries past often seem to inhabit another world altogether, but a surly teen is a relatable trope throughout the ages.

La Tour had many aesthetic signatures: the exquisite optics conjured, the eerie obscurity his figures inhabited, the way he mixed spirituality and realism and the spare settings that placed the viewer’s focus squarely on his figures. Even if these choices were not ones he invented—as this show highlights, there were art colleagues who did similar—Feigenbaum boasts of La Tour: “He outpainted everyone else.”

“From Shadow to Light” is on view at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris through January 25, 2026

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