The Penitent Magdalene, c.1640 Georges de La Tour (1593-1652)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Georges de La Tour also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Penitent Magdalene is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A single flame does all the work in this room. It whitens Mary Magdalene’s cheek, grazes the ridge of a skull, catches the edge of two books, and then gives up, letting the rest sink into brown shadow. Georges de La Tour knew how to make darkness feel inhabited rather than empty, and here the silence has a real weight to it, almost the weight of held breath.

She sits turned inward, head resting on her hand in that old, melancholy pose one knows from Dürer’s Melencolia, yet nothing here feels borrowed or literary. Her thought seems slow, private, almost stubbornly private. The candle is not merely a light source but a measure of mortal life, thin and wavering. On her knees lies the skull she cups with long, grave fingers, while beside her a small crucifix and the closed books suggest reading interrupted by meditation. One might imagine the air is faintly warm near the flame and cool everywhere else.

What makes this version so moving is its austerity. Among the several known Magdalenes by Georges de La Tour, this one has been pared back. Drapery is simpler, contrasts are gentler, the whole scene darker and more inward. Tour leaves out anything anecdotal. Even the coarse robe, tied with a rope, matters: no perfume of former luxury lingers here, only the rigour of an almost Franciscan renunciation. The red skirt or cushion at her lap glows like an ember under ash, one of the few rich notes in a painting otherwise tuned to umber, cream, smoke-grey and black.

Look closely at the right forearm. The sleeve sits a touch oddly, and that slight awkwardness has the fascination of a thought revised; we know Georges de La Tour altered it, lowering the fabric more in an earlier idea. That small adjustment matters because it reminds us how controlled this simplicity is. Nothing is casual. Even the still life on the table has the grave balance of a devotion. The books stack horizontally, but the candle rises in a narrow vertical, and the crucifix lies almost modestly among them, as if faith here is lived rather than displayed.

Caravaggio is the obvious ancestor in candlelit drama, but La Tour is cooler, more sealed, less theatrical. He does not stage repentance so much as suspend it in time. Perhaps that is why this Magdalene stays with you. In the Louvre Museum Paris France, she seems less like a sinner redeemed than a woman discovering, in absolute quiet, how near life always is to extinction.