1593-1652 French Georges de La Tour Galleries His early work shows influences from Caravaggio, probably via his Dutch followers, and the genre scenes of cheats??as in The Fortune Teller ??and fighting beggars clearly derive from the Dutch Caravaggisti, and probably also his fellow-Lorrainer, Jacques Bellange. These are believed to date from relatively early in his career. La Tour is best known for the nocturnal light effects which he developed much further than his artistic predecessors had done, and transferred their use in the genre subjects in the paintings of the Dutch Caravaggisti to religious painting in his. Unlike Caravaggio his religious paintings lack dramatic effects. He painted these in a second phase of his style, perhaps beginning in the 1640s, using chiaroscuro, careful geometrical compositions, and very simplified painting of forms. His work moves during his career towards greater simplicity and stillness ?? taking from Caravaggio very different qualities than Jusepe de Ribera and his Tenebrist followers did. He often painted several variations on the same subjects, and his surviving output is relatively small. His son Etienne was his pupil, and distinguishing between their work in versions of La Tour's compositions is difficult. The version of the Education of the Virgin, in the Frick Collection in New York is an example, as the Museum itself admits. Another group of paintings (example left), of great skill but claimed to be different in style to those of de La Tour, have been attributed to an unknown "Hurdy-gurdy Master". All show older male figures (one group in Malibu includes a female), mostly solitary, either beggars or saints. After his death in 1652, La Tour's work was largely forgotten until rediscovered by Hermann Voss, a German scholar, in 1915. In 1935 an exhibition in Paris began the revival in interest among a wider public. In the twentieth century a number of his works were identified once more, and forgers tried to help meet the new demand; many aspects of his œuvre remain controversial among art historians.  Related Paintings of Georges de La Tour :. | Bubender Hl. Hieronymus | Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene | Hl. Philippus | Die Wurfelspieler | st.joseph the carpenter |
Related Artists:
Jacopo Zucchi
(c. 1541- c. 1590) was a Florentine painter of the Mannerist style, active in Florence and Rome. His training began in the studio of Giorgio Vasari, and he participated in decoration of the Studiolo and the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio. Moving to Rome in the early 1570s, he worked for the Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici in his Palazzo Firenze (1574). He also helped decorate, along with his brother, the apse and dome of Santo Spirito in Sassia with a fresco of the Pentecost. He painted the grand salon of the former Rucellai (now Ruspoli) palace in Rome with mythologic genealogies. Two canvases, representing the Ascension and Resurrection, are housed in the church of San Lorenzo Martire in San Lorenzo Nuovo (Italy).
Johannes Natus
painted Peasants smoking and making music in an inn in 1660
Andrea Pozzo
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1642-1709 Italian painter, architect and stage designer. He was a brilliant quadratura painter, whose most celebrated works, such as the decoration of the church of S Ignazio in Rome, unite painting, architecture and sculpture in effects of overwhelming illusionism and are among the high-points of Baroque church art. He was a Jesuit lay brother and produced his most significant work for the Society of Jesus. This affiliation was fundamental to his conception of art and to his heightened awareness of the artist's role as instrumental in proclaiming the faith and stimulating religious fervour. The methods he used were those of Counter-Reformation rhetoric, as represented in Ignatius Loyola's Spirited Exercises (1548).