An Illuminating Vision of La Tour

“Georges de La Tour and His World” is a beautiful exhibition, both for the quirky work of the provincial 17th century French painter it means to elucidate and for the sober sense of useful moderation with which it has been organized.

In a museum world smitten with blockbuster shows of star-studded names, about whom flashy curatorial back flips are regularly performed, this is one exhibition that refrains from outlandish claims about its subject.

Indeed, at the National Gallery of Art, the most powerful and compelling picture in the show is not even by Georges de La Tour. Because La Tour (1593-1652) is a somewhat shadowy figure whose life and career are still being pieced together by scholars, and because he is a sometimes breathtaking painter whose work should be far better known to the general public than it is, curator Philip Conisbee has smartly included 10 paintings by nine other artists of the day. They give appropriate, illuminating context to La Tour’s often haunting work.

One gallery midway through the show is devoted to pictures on the subject of the slippery world of fortunetellers and gambling, pictorial morality plays describing ancient human folly. The room contains some of La Tour’s most convincing Baroque pantomimes, including “The Cheat With the Ace of Clubs” and “The Fortune Teller” (both circa 1630-34).

In the first, a household maid distracts her card-playing mistress with a glass of wine while eyeing her cohort, who sneaks a hidden ace from the belt behind his back. In the second, a crone tells the fortune of a supercilious young dandy, who is oblivious to the surrounding maidens picking his pockets.

The pride and vanity of youthful aristocrats, whom La Tour painted like exquisitely refined porcelain dolls with slightly vacant expressions on their fragile faces, are no match for the wiliness of thieves. Similarly themed pictures by many less-gifted contemporaries from throughout Western Europe, including Bartolomeo Manfredi, Simon Vouet and Valentin de Boulogne, demonstrate both the broad popularity of the gambling subject during the period and La Tour’s particular skills in representing it.

And then there is “The Cardsharps,” painted by the great Roman artist Caravaggio (1571-1610). Hanging on the gallery’s end wall, it blows away everything else in the room.

Including La Tour.

Caravaggio’s rendering of a pretty young boy being cheated at cards bristles with erotic tension and the stomach-churning threat of violence, as a potentially explosive moment of truth is about to unfold in the game of life. By contrast, La Tour’s crystalline scene is ethereal and airy, a courtly cautionary tale against being made the fool. The stakes of the contest just aren’t the same.

The effect of interrupting your dreamy La Tour reverie with a sharp blast of Caravaggio’s hard-edged genius might seem counterproductive, like inviting Marcus Allen to play in a college football exhibition. It turns out to be just the reverse.

La Tour stands head and shoulders above the other painters in the show, his remarkable skills thrown into high relief. But the juxtaposition also firmly pegs him as an artist high in the second rank, not quite the equal of a history-changing master like Caravaggio. Rare is the museum exhibition that so clearly--and frankly--identifies relative merit.

There would be no La Tour without the bracing precedent of the Italian painter, who died when the Frenchman was just 17. It isn’t known for sure whether La Tour ever saw an actual Caravaggio; resident all his life in the war-torn province of Lorraine, he probably never traveled to Rome.

The temperament of the two artists couldn’t be more different: Caravaggio’s sensational earthiness contrasts with La Tour’s cerebral serenity. But La Tour was at least indirectly affected by the Italian. Caravaggio’s savvy exploitation of theatrical lighting for heightened dramatic effect and his commitment to using scruffy people off the street as models is there--transformed--in the paintings of La Tour.

“The Newborn Child” (circa 1645) shows a sweetly idealized young mother holding a tightly swaddled infant, their sharply outlined bodies emerging from the darkness in the light of a candle held by an older woman. The candle’s flame is hidden behind the woman’s upraised hand, emphasizing the mysteriousness of a source of illumination that nonetheless bathes the scene in a golden glow.

It’s easy to see “The Newborn Child” as a Madonna and Child attended by St. Anne, a traditional Christian subject. But it operates on a secular level too, conveying the eternal mystery of life through its domestic union of infancy, adulthood and old age, all shrouded in a terrible darkness pierced by an unseen source of warmth and light.

La Tour also painted half a dozen versions of the biblical story of Mary Magdalen, the lowly but repentant harlot whom Jesus forgave. Three are in the show.

In the magnificent example borrowed from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Magdalen is readily identifiable as a Christian icon. But she’s also just a simple peasant girl, holding a skull in one hand and resting her head--her own living skull--in the other, lost in thoughts of mortal mystery while gazing into the flame of a burning oil lamp.

The avid Counter-Reformation of the Roman Catholic Church is of course the source of this omnipresent duality; the lives of saints are humanized in order to speak of simple piety to contemporary audiences being lured to Protestantism. La Tour was working for aristocratic clients like the duke of Lorraine and King Louis XIII; he wasn’t about to shake things up.

Instead, La Tour’s pictures seek to create powerfully contemplative images of harmonious serenity. Even a startling, apparently anomalous painting of a candle-lit young woman, seated on a simple bench with her feet planted firmly on the floor as she carefully examines her body for fleas, is a model of composure. Devout attention to purity of body and spirit is effortlessly conveyed.

In an era of pestilence and plague, exacerbated by the bloodshed of countless regional wars, there are practical reasons for putting cleanliness next to godliness. But other explanations are also probable.

Like American Luminist painters in the late 1860s and 1870s, whose acutely rendered landscapes cast the countryside in a preternatural glow of sunlight that belied the awful social chaos of the years following the Civil War, La Tour’s images of eternal harmony and grace are poised against the debilitating social realities of his day. These are pictures that proclaim an eternal continuity ordained by God, offering solace to beleaguered patrons.

* National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street at Constitution Avenue, Washington, D.C., (202) 737-4215, through Jan. 5. Open daily. The show will travel to the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Feb. 2-May 11.