Der heilige Sebastian, von der heiligen Irene gepflegt

For nearly three centuries almost nobody knew who Georges de La Tour was. He was a successful painter in Lorraine in the 1640s, then forgotten so completely that his name dropped out of the books, and works like this drifted into obscurity. This large night scene was found in 1945 hanging in a small parish church in Normandy, its author unrecognised, and only reached the Louvre in 1979. It shows the martyr Sebastian stretched on the ground, an arrow in his side, while the widow Irene kneels to tend him by the light of a single torch. La Tour reduces everything to a few smooth shapes and that one flame. A second version in Berlin was long taken for the original, until the two were set side by side.