Analysis of Job and His Wife

This scene is a more sober one than those depicted in the preceding genre paintings, yet its interpretation remains difficult. Historians have catalogued it under the title "Visit to the Prisoner", a label that could serve as a convenient moral conclusion to the series of "cheating" scenes we just finished visiting. However, art specialists are now almost unanimous in identifying this light-and-shadow duo as Job being jeered by his wife.

As we explicitly mentioned above, when speaking of The Flea Catcher - and as you yourself have no doubt noticed throughout your visit - light plays a major role in Georges de La Tour's painting. Just as in Caravaggio's work, all is night and light, night and sun, night and flame. Caravaggio, however, never shows the source of his light: it comes from outside, from higher up; he portrays reality transcended. La Tour, on the other hand, always depicts the source of light within his works. Light is designated in his paintings, so that here the halo of light forming the center of the composition comes from the candle, and everything turns around this center of gravity. An unending palaver proceeds from one face to another, from the faces to the candle, from the hands to the faces, from misery to comfort, from well-being to decline, as if in an eternal cycle of questioning. The shadow-and-light dualism is a historian's concept, whereas the other philosophic and metaphysical duality brought to light here by the artist is defined by the composition, by the staging in space of the subject figures. Hence here, the wife - enormously big and tall, wearing her belt very high and featuring a small head, as if deformed by anamorphosis - asserts herself through an extremely solid and stable position, almost threatening, above the precarious, fragile and derisory situation in which Job is portrayed. The artist's statement is thus simplified, purified: only two figures, staged in the light of a single flame. By reverse effect, this simplification renders his statement all the stronger and more expressive.

Several key dates

In 1915, the historian Hermann Voss attributed two paintings belonging to the Museum of Nantes to Georges du Mesnil de La Tour. In 1922, the brilliant art historian Louis Demonts was amazed to discover certain paintings in various museums of the French province of Lorraine - most especially those of Nantes, Epinal, and Rennes - that quite obviously were done by the same hand. His rediscovery was kept a secret reserved to the salons of the intellectual elite of the day. It was considered best that the news be kept from the public at large. In 1926, the collector Pierre Landry purchased The Cheat, which, upon cleaning, revealed - lo and behold - a signature!
And, finally, in 1934 a major exhibition at the Orangerie Museum of Paris put thirteen works by Georges de la Tour on display. Meanwhile, a third historian, Charles Sterling, set forth these discoveries in "The painters of reality", alongside the likes of, for example, Philippe de Champaigne or the Le Nain brothers.