Looking at one scene of poverty after another, I easily forgot that he designed flattering moral tales for wealthy patrons. He never condescends to subjects, not even the villains. This is their moral dilemma too, and the treachery of appearances is ours. In other ways as well, Vermeer and La Tour use the very means of convention to take the genre out of genre painting. Figures sit nearly motionless, in a markedly shallow space.
Heads bow, whether in inward reflection or in concentration on the everyday.
La Tour has the special power to imagine the commonplace with a vivid crudeness. His people may bend to eat, to crush a flea, or to pick a card as readily as to pray. To a modern eye, nothing at all seems to happen. No wonder that, for many critics, the modernist silence has been an active silencing, a harsh denial . For others, from Kandinsky and Mondrian to the present, it has been a spiritual revelation .