Georges de La Tour

For nearly 250 years almost no one knew the name Georges de La Tour. He was a successful painter in the Duchy of Lorraine, in what is now eastern France, in the early 1600s, prosperous enough to be resented by his neighbours for it. Then he died in 1652, his reputation faded, and his paintings drifted off under other artists' names, taken for Spanish or Dutch work.

He was pulled back out of the dark in 1915, when a German art historian named Hermann Voss recognised that several mysterious candlelit pictures in French museums were by a single forgotten hand and put La Tour's name back on them. Today he is prized above all for his night scenes, lit by one candle whose flame is often hidden behind a hand or a figure, so the whole image glows from a source you cannot quite see.

Those quiet religious paintings, a newborn held to the light, a penitent Magdalene gazing at a skull and a flame, feel almost modern in their stillness. His daytime work is harsher, full of card-sharps and beggars and hurdy-gurdy players painted without flattery. Roughly 40 pictures are now accepted as his, and scholars still argue over which ones are truly from his hand.