Lost & Found

Among the old masterpieces from Germany now touring the U.S. (last week they were in Philadelphia) was one painting that was almost out of place, it looked so modern. It was a scene bathed in sickly torchlight, chill as a tomb, still as death--a stark and somber painting called Saint Sebastian Mourned by Saint Irene. To most gallerygoers the name under it--Georges de la Tour--meant nothing.

Thirty-five years ago the name would have stumped even the experts. But last week it was on many lips. In its first purchase for two years, Manhattan's conservative Frick collection had just bought La Tour's Education of the Virgin--the fourth U.S.-owned La Tour.

Georges du Mesnil de la Tour lived in the 17th Century, in a quiet town deep in the Duchy of Lorraine. There he married an heiress, and probably using his family as models, painted his life away. He sold a few canvases to the Dukes of Lorraine. Once, when Louis XIII marched into the Duchy in the midst of a plague, La Tour presented him with his Saint Sebastian in the Night. The king removed all other paintings from his room (perhaps, one historian suggests, because he hoped Saint Sebastian would protect him from the plague).

In 1652 Georges de la Tour, by then painter-in-ordinary to the king, died of pneumonia. His fame slipped away, his name was lost. His scattered paintings, only a few of them signed, and all of them showing the influence of the great Caravaggio, were attributed to Caravaggio's followers and other artists: the brothers Le Nain, Vermeer, the obscure 17th Century Antoine de Latour and the 18th Century Maurice Quentin de la Tour.

In 1863, a French architect collected a few scraps on the life of La Tour, but could find none of his paintings. It was not until 50 years later that a German scholar named Hermann Voss finally discovered the first ones. By now, scholars have identified about 15 of La Tour's paintings. Last week visitors, clustered in one of the galleries of the Frick, could study for themselves the special marks of his great talent--the smooth, stylized surfaces, gleaming in ghostly candlelight; the quiet faces reflecting stolid patience; a slender hand, translucent to the flame.

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