Arts
fromHyperallergic
6 days agoThe Anti-Caravaggio of the Baroque Era
Georges de la Tour’s Caravaggesque chiaroscuro lends intimate, spiritual quality to austere genre paintings, but cramped gallery conditions and lighting dilute their effect.
And yet, not a century earlier, that name was near unknown to anyone who knew anything about the history of painting in France. In fact, it was a German art historian with prodigious visual recall, Hermann Voss, who in 1915 thought to connect two paintings in the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts (respectively signed "GS. de La Tour" and "G. de La Tour") with an unsigned canvas, titled Newborn Child, in Rennes.