Saint Thomas

In 1950 the art historian Madeleine Pré tracked this canvas down at the château de Gallerande in western France. As the scholar Jacques Thuillier later told it, the owner threatened to set her dogs on the first historian who rang at the gate. It stayed there until 1985, when a descendant of the family left it to the French hospital charity of the Order of Malta, and in 1988 the Louvre bought it with the help of a national public subscription. The painting shows a single apostle, bald and bearded, a worn book in one hand and a spear in the other, its iron head angled toward us. In the medieval Golden Legend, Thomas dies in India, run through with spears by pagan priests. The museum dates the picture to around 1634 to 1638. La Tour signed it at the top and misspelled his own Latin first name as Georguis.