Prado to open French Baroque painter Georges de La Tour exhibit

Prado to open French Baroque painter Georges de La Tour exhibit

PanARMENIAN.Net - On 23 February, the Museo del Prado will be opening the exhibition Georges de La Tour. 1593-1652, on display in Room C of its Jerónimos Building. The exhibition will allow visitors to discover La Tour’s artistic personality, expressed through both his realist treatment of humble figures and his refined religious scenes, Art Daily reports.

A century after the rediscovery of the artist with the publication of the art historian Hermann Voss’s article in the German publication Archiv für Kunstgeschichte, the Museo del Prado has brought together thirty-one of the forty known works by this painter from Lorraine. Prior to his rediscovery in 1915, La Tour’s works were attributed to other northern painters (particularly his night scenes) and to Spanish artists, principally Zurbarán, Ribera and Velázquez. Saint Jerome reading a Letter in the Prado, for example, has an inscription on the reverse reading “Zurbaran”, to whom it was undoubtedly attributed and which probably explains its presence in a Spanish collection.

The present exhibition offers a chronological survey of La Tour’s career, which was directly associated with historical events of his time.

Georges de La Tour has only recently been discovered in terms of his artistic personality. Little is known of his early training in the Catholic city of Vic-sur-Seille in Lorraine (France), which he must have completed around 1610 when he was aged about 17. Subsequent documentation reveals him as a financially successful painter with a brusque personality but professionally renowned. At the end of his career La Tour was appointed painter to Louis XIII.

La Tour lived at a crucial period for the history of Lorraine, which culminated with the loss of the duchy’s political independence. Within this context the artist evolved a painting of surprising lyricism, particularly in his nocturnal scenes, nearly all of them religious. These are almost monochrome works with monumental forms, filled with solitude and silence.

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