Peasant couple eating peas

Georges de La Tour, the great realist painter from Lorraine, who was lauded in 1639 as a “peintre ordinaire du Roi” and in 1644 as a “peintre fameux”, sank into obscurity soon after his death, i. e. as early as the 17th century. The impulse for his rediscovery a century ago took the form of an essay written by Hermann Voss (1915), the great connoisseur of Baroque painting, who would later be responsible as a curator at the Berlin Gemäldegalerie for the acquisition in 1928 of Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene, one of the later night-time pictures which established La Tour’s fame. And although the present picture has meanwhile come to be regarded generally as a replica of inferior quality or a copy of the original, which is found today in the Louvre, as confirmed most recently by Jean Pierre Cuzin in the catalogue to the Parisian La Tour exhibition of 1997, the Gemäldegalerie was able to compensate for this downgraded classification in 1976 with the acquisition of the Peasant Couple Eating Peas, an undisputed original from the early years of La Tour’s career which surfaced only in 1975. It is among the realistic “daylight pictures” in which La Tour depicts the common folk in his home in Lorraine – peasants, beggars, and itinerant musicians from the lower social strata who had been impoverished by war, plunder, and epidemics.
Depicted as nearly life-sized half-figures and cut off at the waist, the two elderly peasants stand before the beholder as though pausing while consuming their meager repast of yellow split peas, which they convey to their mouths from brown earthenware bowls using short-handled spoons: the old man on the right is bent forward, his head sunken slightly between his shoulders, his dour, gloomy, bitter, lowered gaze directed somewhere in front of him, gripping his implement convulsively in a calloused hand that is deformed by gout. The woman carries a spoonful of peas to her mouth. As though interrupted momentarily, her mouth already opened, the tendons in her neck tensed, she pauses and gazes out at us with deep-set eyes from which the light seems to have been distinguished. A pale, sharp, cold sidelight gives sculptural emphasis to their wrinkled, sunburned skin and hard, dry facial features, delineating each of the fine wrinkles in the old man’s face, producing reflections on his moist lower lip and gleaming white in the cloth over his shoulder and in the woman’s white headscarf and neckerchief.
The setting remains undefined – in a way that is consistent with the tradition of the half-figure pictures of Caravaggio in which the present work stands, and with which La Tour may have become acquainted through the works of Hendrick Terbrugghen, who returned to the Netherlands from Italy in 1614, or through Gerard Seghers of Antwerp. The faces and hands of the present picture are painted with a pointed, nervous, sharply articulated, finely nuanced brush, and far more broadly, powerfully, and rapidly in the garments, while the grey of the background was laid down very lightly and almost cursorily on top of the yellowish underpainting, which shows through brightly at the edges of the contours of the heads.
Although the painting dates from the beginning of La Tour’s development, it quickly became famous. No fewer than three 17th-century copies are known: one in the Musée Historique Lorrain in Nancy, one in a German and another in a French private collection. They show that the original was cut down by approximately 10 cm, in particular below. The thematic complex comprising beggars and beggar musicians playing music or fighting, whose origins are found in the Netherlands of the 16th century, was disseminated in Lorraine in the early 17th century primarily through prints that reproduced works by the Lorraine court painter Jacques Bellange, by Georges Lallemant in Paris, and by Jacques Callot, who returned to Lorraine from Florence in 1621. Precursors and parallels are found in the Netherlandish art of the later 16th century (Peasant Couple, Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest) and in Dutch painting (Jan van de Venne, Jan Wouterz Stap, Pieter Feddes, circa 1615, engraved by Claes Jansz. Visscher).
The most closely related works, whether artistically, thematically, or chronologically, are the two depictions of a male and a female peasant in San Francisco (probably produced in connection with popular street theatre), the series of half-figures of the apostles in Albi (and elsewhere), only some of which have survived, the Organ Grinder of Bergues, and the Musicians’ Brawl in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Listed in the inventory of a collection in Nancy, dated 1635, is a picture of a Man Eating Peas and his Wife without the name of the painter, which has been associated with the Berlin picture by La Tour. Erich Schleier | 200 Masterpieces of European Painting - Gemäldegalerie Berlin, 2019