Meditate with Georges de La Tour (1593-1652)

Hard. Cold. Closed. Darkness* failures, misfortune, abandonment takes everything, covers everything, extinguishes everything. Until a flame, small, fragile, dares to burst out of the chaos, opening a breach, resurrecting hope. Life is therefore possible, even there. This is what this little smoking candle seems to mean, in this work by Georges de La Tour. If the painting is indeed attributed to the Lorraine painter, what it precisely represents remains more uncertain.

For a long time, the painting was called The prisoner, evoking the terrible fate of those forgotten in sinister dungeons of all time. But many experts see it above all as an evocation of a biblical scene, the one where the wife of the prophet Job comes to mock the misfortune of her partner.

While Job’s sick body is covered with a painful ulcer, she has only hurtful condescension for him, mixing reproach with nihilistic advice: “You still persist in your integrity! Curse God and die!” (Job 2:9). Sitting like a child on his wooden stool, Job, almost naked, his hands twisted in pain, looks at his wife in astonishment.

His large red coat, tied high with a white work apron, nevertheless shines before him, in a blaze of red, orange, white and brown. But in the heart of this woman who looks down on him, Job sees only darkness. Hard. Cold. Closed.

*The word, usually in the feminine plural, is singular in Psalm 138: “Even darkness is not darkness to you, and the night as the day is light!”