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 :. | The adoracion of the shepherds | The Penitent Magdalen | Alte | Georges de La Tour | St.Irene Removing Arrows from St.Sebastian's Leg |
Related Artists:
Hans Muelich
painted Court Jester Mertl, Munich in 1545
Giuseppe Pelizza
painted Prato fiorito in 1900 - 1903
Frederic Remington
American Painter and Sculptor, 1861-1909 American painter, sculptor, illustrator and writer. In 1878 he began his studies at the newly formed School of the Fine Arts at Yale University in New Haven, CT, remaining there until 1880. This, along with a few months at the Art Students League in New York in 1886, was his only period of formal art training. In 1881 he roamed through the Dakotas, Montana, the Arizona Territory and Texas to document an era that was fast vanishing. He returned east and in 1882 had his first drawing published (25 Feb) in Harper's Weekly. Further commissions for illustrations followed, including that for Theodore Roosevelt's Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (New York, 1888) (see BOOK ILLUSTRATION, fig. 8).