Shop art print and framed art La Femme à la puce by Georges de La Tour

Woman with a Flea - a painting by the French painter Georges de La Toura (unsigned work) located in the Musée Lorrain in Nancy. The picture was probably painted in the late 1730s and early 1740s, as the French historian Jacques Thuillier has argued. Until 1955, the painting was unknown. It was only when Mlle Berhaut rediscovered it in the collection of a family in Rennes that the painting was presented to the public by François-Georges Pariset. The subject of the painting was taken from the Dutch painters. It depicts a poor woman in a nightdress crushing an insect on her obese or pregnant belly. Since its "discovery", the painted scene has been interpreted in various ways by art historians. Hypotheses have been put forward to the effect that the viewer is dealing with an early stage of childbirth. In 1972, Hélène Adhémar, head of the documentation service in the paintings department of the Musée du Louvre, put forward the idea in the pages of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts that the woman is moving the beads of the rosary and that she is a pregnant penitent from the convent of Notre-Dame du Refuge. Another hypothesis was put forward the same year by Raymond Picard. He believed that the woman depicted in the painting was another representation of Mary Magdalene painted by Georges de La Toura. Both theories have been disproved, and most historians today opt for the first version with the titular woman. The painting of the Woman with the Flea is the only known nude by Georges de La [...]

 

This artwork is a painting from the classical period. It belongs to the baroque style.

 

« La Femme à la puce » is kept at Musée Historique Lorrain, Nancy, France.

 

Find the full description of La Femme à la puce by Georges de La Tour on Wikipedia.