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 :. | Hl. Jacobus der Jungere | Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene | The incorrect player | The New born | The Fortune Teller |
Related Artists:
Andrea della Verrocchio
1435-1488 Italian Andrea della Verrocchio Gallery
Friedrich Herlin
(c. 1425/30 - 1500) was a German painter. His earliest known work, depicting scenes from the Life of the Virgin, is dated 1459. A signature on an altarpiece in Nördlingen, dating it to 1462, identifies him as being from Rothenburg, as do citizenship documents from 1467. Nevertheless, it is possible that he lived there for only a short time, and that his origins lie in Ulm, where a painter named Hans Herlin lived and worked from 1449 until 1468. Stylistically, he borrowed much from Rogier van der Weyden, indicating a great deal of familiarity with the art of the Netherlands and of Cologne. The sculpture attached to the altarpiece of 1462, though officially listed as by the so-called "Master of Nördlingen", has been tentatively ascribed to Nicolaus Gerhaert, which if true would indicate extensive contacts to the highest artistic circles of the era. Little else is known of Herlin, save that he died in Nördlingen in 1500.
LA TOUR, Maurice Quentin de
French Rococo Era Painter, 1704-1788 French pastellist. He was one of the greatest pastellists of the 18th century, an equal of Jean-Simeon Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. Unlike them, however, he painted no works in oils. Reacting against the stately portraits of preceding generations and against the mythological portraits of many of his contemporaries, La Tour returned to a more realistic and sober style of work. The fundamental quality of his art lies in his ability to suggest the temperament and psychology of his subjects by means of their facial expression, and thereby to translate their fugitive emotions on to paper: 'I penetrate into the depths of my subjects without their knowing it, and capture them whole', as he himself put it. His considerable success led to commissions from the royal family, the court, the rich bourgeoisie and from literary, artistic and theatrical circles.