A very active, renowned artist, named painter to the crown in 1639. The few, precious surviving works present an overwhelming reality inside a highly calculated formal construction.
Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) was a very active and famous artist (in 1639 he was named painter to the crown), but very little of his output has survived: just thirty works or so, covering a career of nearly forty years. His training is clearly legible in terms of Rome and Caravaggio. His early works are comparable to those of the protagonists of 17th-century naturalism (Gentileschi, Saraceni, Manfredi, Ter Brugghen and others) gravitating around Rome in the second decade of that century. Based on radically realistic studies, his paintings aim to organize an overwhelming reality inside a highly calculated formal construct.
This volume is edited by Pierre Rosenberg, former director of the Louvre and the leading expert on La Tour. It also contains a register of the painter’s works.