Magdalene with the Smoking Flame (Louvre, RF 1949 11)

An oil-on-canvas painting by the French Baroque painter Georges de La Tour, one of two near-identical versions he produced of this composition, the other now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Mary Magdalene sits alone at night, bare shouldered, a skull resting in her lap and her chin propped on her hand as she stares into a candle flame whose light she partly shields with her other hand, the wick trailing smoke that gives the painting its name. Books, a wooden cross and a knotted rope scourge lie on the table before her, conventional emblems of the penitent Magdalene's withdrawal from a life of vanity into solitary contemplation and asceticism. Bought by the Louvre in 1949 from the French customs administration, the canvas is among the best known of La Tour's several treatments of the same penitent subject, distinguished by its use of a single candle flame as the sole light source, a technique closely associated with his mature work.