BOOKS OF THE DAY
A Rediscovered Master
Georges de Ia Tour of Lorraine. 1593-1652. By S. M. M. Furness. (Routledge and. Regan Paul. 42s.) THERE is something providential in the rediscovery of a great artist. It comes as unexpectedly yet, in retrospect, as inevitably as the creative momeot itself. The nineteenth century, with an unconfessed nostalgia for an age when materialism had an heroic dignity, charmed by photographic tonality and seeking without knowing it a bonne peinture free of its subversive contemporary undertones, delved into the past and uncovered Vermeer. And so our own time, guided by its own painters yet perhaps half-aware of what they lack, has begun to reconstruct the once famous figure of Georges de la Tour.
The three or four pictures that were recognised as by Georges de Ia Tour twenty years ago indicated at once an artist who had solved with unique success a task which occupied painters of every country in the second quarter of, the seventeenth century. Georges de la Tour gave to the disruptive style of Caravaggio a settled, classic frame ; it was a typically French a..-hievement. And within it he unfolded, almost for the first time, that tender and observant view of human life that later painters have made the peculiar property of the school. It is this conjunction, the meeting of two poles of the national genius, that we find so beautiful. In Georges de la Tour's architecture the sacred meets the everyday. A pensive girl, a mother and her child, an old man asleep, take on a holy radiance not only as emblems of divinities but of their very nature. Often it is doubtful how we arc to interpret them. A monk may be St. Francis or he may not. An old man in the sorest misery is either Job or St. Peter imprisoned ; for us he becomes both, the representative of all who have been stricken, and the great visitant who ministers to him, a marvellous invention, the mountainous embodiment of mercy, the natural human shape of charity itself. There is no artifice in these ambiguities ; they are the essence of a most profound estimate of humanity. A great artist is emerging, perhaps as great as any that France can show, and one of whom we shall never know enough until we know all that is to be known.
It is on this master that Miss Furness has now written a very useful book. Industry is her chief quality ; she has sorted and summarised the considerable amount of earlier literature on the subject, and although some of the more recent escapes her notice—much of the book appears to have been written some years ago—her compilation will save everyone who is interested a great deal of trouble. Her notes are encyclopaedic ; indeed she is valiantly prepared to shoulder the whole responsibility for the general education of her readers. She expounds the Origenist controversy, provides a thumbnail history of the United Provinces, compares at length poems by.Ronsard and Charles d'Orleans, quoting both in full ; not one of the fish in her net has been thrown back. On more relevant matters our information is less complete. Only one of the works that we have is dated. Others are referred to in early sources, but it is uncertain that any
of them are identical with the pictures of similar subjects which we know. As usual, a number of hypotheses are advanced to fill the gaps in our knowledge. Miss Furness follows Paul Jamot in thinking that the master visited Italy early in his career ; the suggestion recalls a similar conjecture which for long confused the study of Vermeer. The weight of probability seems to me to be against it. The com- position of Caravaggio's "Entombment " was certainly well known in Utrecht, and the painting of Georges de la Tour is notably free from the accumulations of painfully convincing detail which intoxi- cated the painters who learnt the style at its source. Was the influence of the Caravaggesque painting of the Netherlands either as light or as transitory as Miss Furness supposes ? The hard fact, which escapes her, is that the dated picture, the " Denial," which must represent the final phase of the artist's development, closely follows an engraving by Gerard Seghers. (One of the recent dis- coveries, missed by Miss Furness, owes its germ to another work by the same artist.) Georges de la Tour's most personal style, that simplification of modelling into a lovely geometry, is his own, but there are elements in it, curving bands of form which, catching the rays of the candle, make wedge-shaped patterns of light and shadow, to suggest that if it derives anything from anywhere it may be from the unlovely style of Utrecht.
Such matters may be left to the .historians. In -the meantime we can form a tentative impression of the painter's development. Miss Furness analyses most ably the mechanics and the poetry of his use of light, and on this basis suggests a very possible chronological order fie the existing works. It is clear that the perfect stylisation of the Rennes " Nativity " is not the final stage of this artist's evolution. He proceeds to deepen and enrich it with even more of the matter of life. Descriptive naturalism remains as far from his purpose as ever ; never were pictorial means more pure. Yet contour and modelling, a technique as unsullied as if the art of painting were newborn, dwell intimately on particular forms. Generalisation gives place to records of gently precise observation, each a new revela- tion of the freshness with which the forms of nature present them- selves to the tender eye. Thus we get such miracles as the head of the Fabius " Magdalen." It is a triumph of that peculiar imaginative faculty that is nourished by the classic realism of Western art. A further significance of Miss Fiurness's book must be remarked. It is the first monograph of substance on the whole work of a Conti- nental master by an English writer that has appeared for many
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