The Iconography of Vermin

aughty, sharp-tongued, self-assured, unbearably self-sufficient, stingy, and violent beyond measure , " is how Georges de La Tour was described by his contemporaries. Municipal records confirm that he refused to pay his share to feed the hungry during times of famine. He assaulted an officer, beat a peasant, and made himself obnoxious to everyone by " sending his dogs after hare into the standing crops which they trample down and ruin. " A " painter " is how he described himself in the marriage contract in 1617. Shortly after the wedding, he moved to Lunéville, a prosperous town near Nancy, in Lorraine, now France, where he lived and worked. His early life and training remain otherwise ambiguous. He was influenced by the style of Caravaggio, either from travel to Italy or from contact with the Dutch followers of the Italian master. He found fame and fortune in his lifetime and was known as " Painter to the King. " He had 10 children, three of whom lived to adulthood. His son Étienne studied under him. La Tour died suddenly, possibly of the plague, within a few days of the deaths in his household of his wife and servant. He was soon forgotten to be discovered hundreds of years later and become an icon, anointed among the greats of his generation. The 1630s was a turbulent period for Lorraine, a region contested by France and Germany for centuries. The 30 Years' War and consequent epidemics, famine, and destruction , compounded by a fire in 1638 that burned Lunéville to the ground, contributed to the loss of much of La Tour's legacy , as many as 400 works. A few remaining paintings were variously thought to be the work of Ribera, Zurbarán, Mu-rillo, Velázquez, Rembrandt, and always, Caravaggio. Some paintings are still emerging from oblivion. The Flea Catcher, on this month's cover, was not attributed to him until 1955. In following Caravaggio, La Tour rejected Baroque classicism, the art movement of his age. He abandoned architectural backdrops and complicated scenes for solitary figures in dark tones. But his kinship with the master went beyond the dramatic chiaroscuro. The two shared, along with a troubling inability to cope with ordinary life, an incongruous gift for capturing its poetry on canvas. Well acquainted with darkness in the world, they brought into their paintings light. And though their choice of subjects wandered into the rogue—criminals, …