Trophime Bigot

Trophime Bigot was long known only from Provence. Born in Arles in 1579, he painted altarpieces for the churches of his home town, among them a Saint Lawrence condemned to torture and an Assumption of the Virgin in 1634. From 1638 to 1642 he lived in Aix-en-Provence, where he painted another Assumption, and he spent his last years between Arles and Avignon.

Rome had a different puzzle. Joachim von Sandrart, a German painter who worked there and later wrote about the artists he had known, remembered a Caravaggesque painter of night pieces called Trufemondi. In 1960 the English art historian Benedict Nicolson grouped about 40 pictures of figures lit by a single candle, in the manner of the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst, and named their unknown author the Candlelight Master. In 1964 he proposed that this master was Bigot, who is documented in Italy between 1620 and 1634 under Italianised names such as Teofili Trufemondi.

For a time scholars spoke of two Bigots, a father and a son, until documents in the Arles archives showed there had been one painter. The link with the candlelight pictures is still argued over. Several scholars, Italian ones above all, find the Roman night scenes too different in style and lighting from the Provençal altarpieces, and give some of them to other painters working in Rome. Bigot was buried in the church of Saint-Pierre in Avignon on 21 February 1650.