Georges de La Tour’s (b. 1593–d. 1652) artistic contributions were largely ignored by posterity until his “rediscovery” in 1915 by the art historian Hermann Voss. The patronage of such luminaries as the Duke of Lorraine, King Louis xiii, and Cardinal Richelieu, and the plethora of early copies, attest to his success during his lifetime. His eventual lapse into obscurity lasting almost three centuries led to the reattribution of his works to Italian, Netherlandish, Spanish, or French Baroque painters. While more than seventy oil paintings have been attributed to La Tour, fewer than forty are accepted as originals. The existence of his paintings in two or more versions, some as autograph replicas or as copies, along with questions about his son Étienne de La Tour’s possible pictorial contributions, left the attribution and chronology of his works mired in conjecture and controversy. Born the second son of a baker of some means at Vic-sur-Seille, he married a widow of minor nobility in 1617. Resettling to Luneville in the Duchy of Lorraine, he gained recognition as a painter in a region devastated by the ravages of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). A casualty of an epidemic, La Tour died a few days after his wife at the height of his artistic career. The scarcity of documentary sources about his life is compounded by the total absence of evidence concerning his artistic training, professional travels, and artistic influences. La Tour’s pursuit of likeness between image and the natural world is believed to bear the influence of Caravaggio or his followers, reflecting post-Tridentine calls for the revitalization of religious imagery. La Tour’s paintings have been traditionally divided into daylight and night-time works, despite notable exceptions. Depictions of daylight serve to bring into moralizing relief foibles of secular life shown in realist genre scenes of brawling, cheating, and fortune-telling. Biblically inspired, his mysterious nocturnal or tenebrist works glow with a poetic luminosity imbued with spiritual connotations. Suspended in the stillness of religious contemplation, his candlelight paintings bear witness to the presence of inner life, depicting modes of consciousness that painting may only suggest but cannot ultimately show. Celebrated for their aura of mystery, his paintings continue to invite scholarly interest and public fascination.