The Penitent Magdalen

La Tour painted this Penitent Magdalen around 1640, in Lorraine in eastern France. He was about 47, working in the small town of Luneville, and he had developed a style of painting that no one else in Europe was producing: scenes lit by a single candle, the figures emerging from near-total darkness, the light caught on faces and fabric and reflected in mirrors. Mary Magdalene sits on the floor in a dark room, her body turned to the left, her face in profile. She is looking at a human skull that sits on a wooden table beside her. Between the skull and Mary, a mirror leans against the wall, and in the mirror you can see the reflection of the candle that lights the scene. The candle itself is hidden behind the skull, so the light comes from an invisible source, casting its glow on Mary's face and hands and the surface of the mirror. The painting is about repentance. Mary has given up her life of pleasure to contemplate death and salvation. The skull is the traditional symbol of mortality, the mirror is the symbol of vanity, and the candle is the symbol of Christ, the light of the world. La Tour arranged these objects with the precision of a still life painter, each one placed to catch the candlelight at a specific angle. La Tour was born in Vic-sur-Seille in Lorraine in 1593. He spent his entire career in the province, far from Paris and the court, and he was largely forgotten after his death in 1652. He was rediscovered in 1915, when a German scholar named Hermann Voss identified a group of paintings in provincial French collections as his work. The Penitent Magdalen was one of the paintings that Voss attributed to La Tour, and it is now considered one of his masterpieces. Oil on canvas, 133 by 102 centimeters, roughly 52 by 40 inches. La Tour painted with a smooth, almost enamel-like surface, building the flesh tones in thin layers of warm color. The candlelight is rendered with extraordinary subtlety, the light falling off in precise gradations from the skull to the edges of the canvas. The darkness is not black but a deep warm brown, the color of the ground layer showing through the thin paint. The dark subject and single light source make this print work well in a bedroom, study, or hallway with low light. The candlelit effect is best appreciated in a room where the print is the brightest object. A dark wood frame matches the painting's tonal range. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the skull, the mirror, and Mary's face enough detail to appreciate up close. The painting is in the Met's collection, a gift from the Wrightsmans in 1978. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.