Joseph the Carpenter by George De La Tour
BLOG # 4
Just look at the child’s hand translucent, painted with an observant eye.
As kids we would shine a torch through our hand and imagined an X-ray.
Look at how the child shields the flame.
The painter is George de la Tour, his later work nearly always includes a flame, similarly shielded from view. Why is this ? First we need some background.
We know very little about George de la Tour. He was born in 1593 in the Lorraine, a staunchly Catholic and independent area bordering on Belgium and Germany. George de la Tour was the son of the peasant class, his father a baker. He became extremely rich, both through marriage and through his painting. At one stage he was Court painter to the King of France.
He was thought to have seen the works of Caravaggio in a visit to Rome. We can’t help but notice the similarities in the light, shadows and bright light. Chiaroscuro. Sometimes known as Tenebrism, dark and mysterious.
Unlike Caravaggio, his images appear static. Caravaggio is full of movement and dynamism. George de la Tour’s paintings feel much more like still lives. They do not seem to invite you in despite their apparent intimacy. They appear to be on the on the other side of glass.
Supper at Emmaus by CaravaggioCaravaggio always invites, he always draws you into the picture, you become part of the picture
George de la Tour excludes you. He keeps you at a distance. A clue to this difference may be found in their different social circumstances. Both include ordinary folk in their pictures, unusual at the time, carpenters, peasants, hurdy gurdy players, card sharps, beggars, criminals and prostitutes. Interestingly however Caravaggio was one of these folk, he lived the life. He was involved in countless brawls, beatings up and court cases. He even killed a man in the underworld of Rome.
George de la Tour becamea rich landowner with a wall of silence between him and his subjects. He is never in the situation he paints. He is at a social distance from them. Perhaps this can explain the difference between the two painters.
The common ground between them of course is light. Light is a player, at times maybe the subject. There is an ethereal brightness to the George de la Tour’s paintings. The light is soft, and humanising. This light of course will flicker and stutter, it is not continuous, it will go out. It is time bound and precious.
In the 17th century darkness descended as the sun went down. Nowadays we are overwhelmed by light everywhere. Darkness is a rarity for us. 17th century light, as in the lantern or candle was standard. The painting can tell us something of the 17th century experience with light.
Light of course is central to my experience of cinematography. It is what I dealt with, ordered and directed. It is my craft. This led me to look at the source of light in the painting Joseph the Carpenter and the candle held by the child. The light is ethereal, suffuses all. It creates an aura of stillness.
What you notice as well is that the child has his hand in front of the candle, partly hiding it from us. This trope, this hiding of the source, occurs in many of George de la Tour’s paintings.Why so ?
Let me digress into my craft, cinematography . A ‘practical’ light is an actual light in a scene, a lantern, a wall light, a chandelier, a candle. It indicates the source of the light within the image. In cinematography this ‘practical light’ is a sleight of hand. The light from the ‘practical’ contributes very little to the actual light on the subject. The substantial source, the film lamp, is off screen, hidden. The value of the light emitted by the ‘practical’ lamp is held back in order for the source not to overwhelm the scene and become its central focus. The hidden source does most of the heavy lifting.
Is this what George de la Tour is doing here? Hiding the source to reduce its potency, hiding its brightness and using the hand to reflect the sublime light back into the image, in order that we might read the scene ? Well that’s one story, an explanation, it is a story however contradicted by the most famous of George de la Tour’s images ; the Maddalena Penitente
Maddalena Penitente by George De La Tour
Here a naked oil flame is unhindered and central. Visible to her and visible to us.
Another story.
In the Christian Bible, fire or flame often represents God’s presence and divine judgment. Fire is the visual manifestation of God. Is the child Jesus alongside his father Joseph, trying to conceal the symbol of god, for if we were to see god would we be able to see and perceive the rest of the painting ? Is the sight of God going to overwhelm us ? Is the partial hiding of the flame an aid to viewing?
The idea of the flame as God is reinforced by George de la Tour’s Maddalena Penitente where the subject is about devotion to God. Here Maddalena looks to the flame, the visible flame, the flame as God, in worship and penitence. She is looking to her God, she can see him and we can see him.
So many stories, so many ways of looking at paintings like this, so many apparent contradictions.
George de la Tour, a rich and and wealthy landowner was disliked by many. Court records show he was often in conflict with his neighbours. In 1646 the populace complained of George de la Tour’s arrogance, wealth and unjust privileges. Hardly a man of the people and yet here is a painter years ahead of his time, painting simple peasants, regular looking people, the people. It would take 200 years before Millet and Courbet took up similar subjects.
Joseph the Carpenter by George De La Tour 1642 can be seen in the Louvre Paris.
Maddalena Penitente by George De La Tour 1640 can be seen in the Metropolitan Museam of Art New York City
Supper at Emmaus by Caravaggio 1601 can be seen in the National Gallery London
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I was also struck by how a number of you who thought that Alex Webb’s pictures in Blog # 3 were in fact combination pictures made via Photoshop and not originals without any additions or manipulation.
Perhaps I can reassure you on this front. Alex Webb is a member of the Magnum Photographers Agency. Magnum is well known for its strictness and belief in authenticity in all aspects of photography so it seems impossible to believe that Alex Webb’s are not originals, Magnum would lay down the law. Further evidence is indicated by some of Alex’s early pictures.. .
Here are three from 1976, made 11 years before Photoshop was ever developed.
I have followed Alex Webb’s career for many years now and never felt once that his photographs are other than authentic originals without any compositing.I am absolutely convinced that Alex’s pictures are all originals with no Photoshop manipulation or additions.
I hope that helps.
The ‘bad boy’ of Baroque, Caravaggio would certainly have a grabbed a few awards as art director/ lighting cameraman/ and director if he had been born in a different era?
If Hockney is right, he probably started off as a focus puller, as with Vermeer, Velasquez and the rest of the boys searching for lens and mirrors on E-bay. One wonders if he had a good screenplay writer (not credited) or whether he was savvy enough to recognize the mood in the Counter-Reformation. Certainly a few producers with connections in the Council of Trent would have been needed to gloss over the inappropriate bits of nudity or portrayals of figures lacking in solemnity (including the son of the Big Man himself) etc. Their pitch would have suggested that ‘radical naturalism’ would fill the pews again and have pointed out the savings that could be made by picking actors off the streets. Perhaps they also suggested a few props that had good potential for symbolism. Always an audience pleaser to have few tropes and memes that the punters have been trained to read.
“Did you see that decaying fruit and the fish-shaped shadow?”
“What was that scallop shell all about? Oh, pilgrimage, I didn’t get that at the time.”
The Dutch ‘caravaggisti’ of the Utrecht Film School slowed things down a bit with lots of lutes, skulls, caged birds, dying flowers and pomegranates – more Greenaway than Tarantino; Drowning in Symbols perhaps, at least a good number of them?
George La Tour probably saw all their productions but zoomed in on the practical lighting idea – candles were a useful standby in pre-electric France. A sort of French John Huston or Francis Ford Coppola with the gangsters replaced by good honest guys and gals but still heavy on the symbolism. The shape of that timber and auger in Joseph the Carpenter is telegraphing the fact that this story is not going to have a happy ending?
Seriously though, Tenebrism, derived from tenebroso, an Italian word meaning “dark, murky, gloomy”, is often described as an extreme form of chiaroscuro using dramatic contrasts between light and dark. Tenebrism sees some figures or scenes engulfed in shadow but principal figures are dramatically illuminated by a beam of light usually from a concealed source or one outside the image area. It is sometimes described as ‘cellar light’ and in some religious paintings implying a ‘divine light’?