Job Mocked by His Wife: When Candlelight Illuminates Cruelty
A man covered in ulcers. His wife mocks him by candlelight. La Tour paints marital cruelty.
By Artedusa
••14 min read
Job Mocked by His Wife: When Candlelight Illuminates Cruelty
In the almost total darkness of a 17th-century chamber, a flickering flame reveals a scene of unbearable psychological violence. A man covered with purulent ulcers, his body emaciated by suffering, sits hunched on a bench. Before him, a woman brandishes a candle. Her face expresses neither compassion nor tenderness, but cutting contempt. This woman is his wife. And this scene, painted with chilling mastery by Georges de La Tour around 1650, captures the moment when physical pain meets marital cruelty.
"Job Mocked by His Wife" is not simply another religious painting in art history. It is a manifesto of human solitude, a silent cry in the night. While most artists of his era depicted Job in his stoic suffering or final redemption, La Tour chooses the cruelest moment: when the person meant to support you betrays you. The candle, which should bring comfort and warmth, becomes the instrument of unspeakable humiliation.
In this canvas preserved at the Departmental Museum of Épinal, the Lorraine painter reaches the summit of his chiaroscuro art. But beyond technical prowess, he delivers a profound meditation on human nature: how low can a human being sink when confronted with another's misfortune, even that of their own spouse?
The Lorraine Master of Night
Georges de La Tour was born in 1593 in Vic-sur-Seille, Lorraine, during a period of religious and political turmoil. Probably trained in Italy where he discovered Caravaggio's revolutionary work, he developed a unique style that would make his reputation: nocturnal painting by candlelight. Unlike Caravaggio, who uses divine and dramatic light often coming from invisible sources, La Tour places his light sources within the painting itself: a candle, a torch, a lantern.
Around 1638, he became "ordinary painter to the king" Louis XIII, an exceptional distinction for a provincial artist. But it is in the years 1640-1650, at the maturity of his art, that he paints his most powerful works. "Job Mocked by His Wife" belongs to this late period when the painter refined his style to the maximum. No more superfluous details, no more décor: only bodies, light, and the naked truth of the human condition.
Lorraine at this time was devastated by the Thirty Years' War. Plague, famine, and violence were daily occurrences. In this context, the theme of Job, a righteous man struck by every possible misfortune, resonated with terrible relevance. La Tour does not paint a distant biblical story: he paints the misfortune of his time.
Job: The Man Who Lost Everything
To understand the scope of this work, we must return to the Book of Job, one of the most powerful and disturbing texts in the Bible. Job is presented as a righteous man, prosperous, a loving father. Satan wagers with God that if Job lost everything, he would renounce his faith. God accepts the bet. In one day, Job loses his herds, his servants, and his ten children. Then he is struck with a malignant ulcer "from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head."
Reduced to scraping his sores with a potsherd, sitting on a heap of ashes outside the city, Job becomes the very incarnation of absolute human suffering. And it is then, in the depths of his despair, that his wife hurls these terrible words at him: "Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die!" In other words: abandon your stupid faith and free yourself through death.
This phrase, devastatingly cruel, has fascinated theologians for centuries. How can Job's wife, who has also lost everything, add to her husband's suffering rather than console him? Is it despair, anger at God, or simply the collapse of all humanity in the face of horror? La Tour chooses not to answer these questions but to make them visible.
The Scene: Anatomy of Cruelty
Let us look closely at the painting. Job is seated, his torso bare, his emaciated body bearing visible marks of disease. His skin, illuminated by the candle, reveals ulcers, wounds, suffering flesh. His hands rest with resignation, his gaze lowered. He does not look at his wife. He has already heard what she has to say. He endures, silent, this additional violence.
The woman, standing before him, dominates the composition. She holds the candle in one hand, and with the other makes a gesture that can be interpreted as mocking or accusatory. Her face, lit from below by the flame, takes on an almost diabolical dimension. This is no accident: lighting from below, which distorts features and hollows shadows, is traditionally associated with evil forces in Baroque painting.
But La Tour is too subtle to make this woman a simple monster. Look at her expression: there is fatigue there, perhaps despair. She too has lost everything. She too suffers. Her cruelty may be only the clumsy expression of pain that finds no other outlet. Or perhaps she is simply broken by misfortune and incapable of compassion. La Tour leaves the ambiguity hanging.
The genius of the painting lies in this candle. It creates a circle of light that encloses the two characters in forced intimacy. Beyond, total darkness. No visible God, no apparent salvation, no luminous hope on the horizon. Just two human beings trapped in their suffering, in the darkest night.
Candlelight Chiaroscuro: A Signature
La Tour's technique in this painting achieves almost mathematical perfection. The single light source - the candle - creates a play of shadows and lights with scientific precision. Observe how the light diffuses: it brightly illuminates the woman's face from below, partially lights Job's torso, then loses itself in the surrounding darkness.
This mastery of chiaroscuro is not just a technical tour de force. It serves the purpose: in this moral and spiritual night, the candle reveals the naked truth of beings. No makeup, no artifice, no décor to soften reality. The light searches the flesh, exposes the wounds, unveils expressions. It functions as a merciless revelation.
Colors are reduced to a minimum: browns, ochres, dark reds. The palette is almost monochrome, concentrating all attention on the play of light and facial expressions. This chromatic sobriety reinforces the dramatic intensity. Nothing distracts from the human drama being played out.
The composition is deceptively simple. Two figures, a black background, a light source. But this simplicity is the fruit of radical stripping away. La Tour has eliminated everything that was not essential to keep only the heart of the drama. It is this refinement that gives the painting its hypnotic power.
Marital Cruelty: A Universal Theme
Beyond the biblical subject, "Job Mocked by His Wife" speaks of a universal and timeless theme: the betrayal of the one in whom you had placed your trust. Marriage, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is supposed to be a place of mutual support, particularly in hardship. "In good times and bad," says the consecrated formula.
Here, La Tour represents the opposite: misfortune that breaks the marital bond instead of strengthening it. The wife, instead of being the refuge, becomes the executioner. This inversion is all the more cruel as it violates a fundamental expectation. Job can accept illness, loss of property, death of his children as trials sent by God. But how can he accept that his own wife, his flesh, betrays him?
This psychological dimension makes the painting much more than a biblical illustration. It is an exploration of absolute solitude, that which occurs when even the most intimate bonds dissolve in the face of adversity. How many people, facing illness, ruin, or depression, have seen their loved ones move away rather than closer? La Tour's painting speaks to this universal experience.
There is also an interesting gendered dimension. In Christian iconography, women are often represented as figures of compassion: Mary at the foot of the cross, saints caring for the sick. Here, La Tour reverses this stereotype. The woman is not the consoler; she is the persecutor. This reversal makes the scene even more disturbing.
Caravaggio and French Tenebrisim
We cannot speak of La Tour without mentioning Caravaggio, the Italian master of tenebrism who died in 1610. Caravaggio had revolutionized painting by introducing brutal realism and dramatic use of shadow and light. His religious scenes, populated by characters with the faces of common people, had scandalized and fascinated.
La Tour probably knew Caravaggio's work, perhaps through copies or during a trip to Italy. But his approach is different. Where Caravaggio is explosive, theatrical, violent in his contrasts, La Tour is meditative, silent, almost mystical. His nocturnal scenes have a quality of contemplation that Caravaggio's works do not have.
Moreover, La Tour always places his light source in the painting: we see the candle, the lantern, the torch. In Caravaggio, light often comes from outside the frame, creating more theatrical effects. La Tour's choice creates a different intimacy: we are in the scene, sharing that same trembling light that illuminates the protagonists.
We could say that if Caravaggio paints drama, La Tour paints the silence after the drama. His characters are often frozen in contemplative immobility. In "Job Mocked by His Wife," there is no violent action: just words that have just been spoken, floating in the heavy night air. It is this silence that La Tour captures with genius.
The Spiritual Dimension: Where Is God?
The Book of Job is fundamentally an interrogation of divine justice and the meaning of suffering. If Job is righteous, why does he suffer? Where is God in all this? La Tour, in painting this scene, poses these questions without answering them.
The absence of any divine symbol in the painting is striking. No angel, no celestial ray of light, no cross, nothing to indicate a divine presence. There is only this human candle, this fragile and flickering light held by the woman. Does this mean God is absent? Or is He hidden in the impenetrable night surrounding the characters?
Some theologians have seen in the candle itself a symbol: faith, a small flame that continues to burn even in the darkest night. Job, despite everything, does not curse God. He remains there, silent, enduring. His patience is itself a form of faith, an inner light that his wife's cruelty cannot extinguish.
Other interpretations see in the darkness surrounding the characters the mysterious presence of God, who observes without intervening. Job's God is a silent God, who manifests only at the end of the book to remind man of his limits. La Tour, by plunging his scene into darkness, places us in this same position of anxious waiting.
The Posterity of a Rediscovered Work
Here is an astonishing fact: Georges de La Tour was almost completely forgotten for nearly three centuries. At his death in 1652, his fame quickly extinguished. His works were dispersed, lost, or attributed to other artists. It was not until 1915 that a German art historian, Hermann Voss, "rediscovered" La Tour and began reattributing works to him.
This 20th-century rediscovery explains why La Tour did not have the same direct influence as Caravaggio or Rembrandt on subsequent generations. But once rediscovered, his impact was immense. Modern and contemporary artists have been fascinated by his ability to create works of maximum emotional intensity with minimal means.
Photographers like Bill Henson or filmmakers like Terrence Malick have clearly been influenced by La Tour's aesthetic: these intimate scenes lit by a single source, these faces emerging from darkness, this atmosphere of almost religious contemplation. Cinema, in particular, with its ability to manipulate light, has found in La Tour a spiritual ancestor.
"Job Mocked by His Wife" perfectly embodies what fascinates about La Tour's art: the ability to transform a biblical scene into a universal meditation on the human condition. Few paintings have captured with such intensity the solitude of suffering and the cruelty humans are capable of, even toward those they love.
The Work Today: Seeing the Painting
The painting is preserved at the Departmental Museum of Épinal, in the Vosges. It is a rare opportunity to see a major work by La Tour in France, as many of his paintings are scattered in foreign museums. The Épinal museum, aware of this treasure, showcases the work in a room dedicated to 17th-century art.
Seeing the painting in person is a different experience from reproduction. The size of the canvas (145 x 97 cm) creates an almost physical presence. You find yourself facing these two characters at human scale, sharing their painful intimacy. And above all, you can observe the subtlety of La Tour's work on light: the infinite gradations between lit areas and shadows, the texture of the paint that creates depth effects.
The museum context, with its controlled lighting, allows appreciation of details that reproductions flatten: the ulcers on Job's skin, the folds of the fabric worn by the woman, the exact expression of her face. It is in these details that the painter's technical mastery and his profound understanding of human anatomy and psychology are revealed.
For those who cannot travel to Épinal, excellent reproductions and numerous online resources exist. But nothing replaces the direct experience, this silent confrontation with a work that, nearly four centuries after its creation, continues to question us about our humanity.
Conclusion: The Candle That Does Not Go Out
"Job Mocked by His Wife" is much more than a 17th-century religious painting. It is a mirror held up to humanity, reflecting our deepest fears: suffering, abandonment, betrayal by those we love. Georges de La Tour, with his brush and his candle, created an icon of human solitude that still resonates today.
In our era where depression, isolation, and the breakdown of social bonds are major problems, La Tour's painting speaks with disturbing relevance. How many people feel like Job: abandoned by those who should support them, alone with their suffering, in a night that seems never to end?
But there is also, paradoxically, something strangely comforting in this painting. Job does not respond to his wife. He does not defend himself, justify himself, or counterattack. He endures, simply. This patience is not weakness: it is immense strength, the strength to continue existing despite everything. The candle continues to burn. The light, however fragile, persists in the darkness.
Perhaps this is La Tour's ultimate message: even in the darkest night, even when all seems lost, even when those we love betray us, there remains this small flame. The flame of human dignity, of faith in something greater than our immediate suffering, of the capacity to endure the intolerable. Job does not curse God. He does not commit suicide. He remains, simply. And in this simple fact of remaining, there is a victory against despair.
Georges de La Tour, forgotten master then rediscovered, has bequeathed us this luminous meditation on the night of the human soul. His candle still burns, four centuries later, illuminating our own darkness.
Job Mocked by His Wife: When Candlelight Illuminates Cruelty | Art History
