Georges de La Tour (c. 1593-1652) was forgotten almost immediately after his death until the early 20th century, but nowadays, he is very popular. The reasons for both the forgetting and the renewed popularity are eerily similar. He painted flat surfaces and intimate settings, and his religious-themed paintings portray saints and the Holy Family as local peasants. In the context of the dramatic Baroque art of Rubens or Caravaggio and the Flemish displays of sumptuous food or busy dance scenes, La Tour’s art must have felt too simple and perhaps too inadequate for the prevailing iconography of his day. In modern times, however, his simplified brushwork and meditative mood fit well with contemporary art taste.

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