Magdalene with the Smoking Flame
c. 1640 · Oil on canvas · Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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This print

About this work
- Artist
- Georges de La Tour (1593–1652)
- Year
- c. 1640
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Original size
- 117 × 91.8 cm
- Collection
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- Movement
- Baroque
Mary Magdalene sits in the dark with a skull in her lap and her hand resting on it, gazing at the smoking flame of an oil lamp that is the only light in the room; books of Scripture and a scourge lie on the table. There is no grotto and no story, only a woman thinking about death and the light. Georges de La Tour painted it in Lorraine, far from Paris, around 1640, and it is one of at least four penitent Magdalenes he made by candlelight; a near-identical version is in the Louvre, and the two differ only in details like the books and the shape of the flame. The wavering lamp recalls what mystics of the day called the living flame of love. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired this version in 1977 from the La Haye family in France through the Ahmanson Foundation, and it is one of the museum's best-known Old Masters.
This print reproduces the whole work, uncropped, from a high-resolution scan of the original. The original is in the public domain.
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About this design
The Madten promise
An exhibition poster
The same artwork as a gallery exhibition poster — title, artist & date typeset beneath the image on a soft ground.
The full-bleed edition
The painting printed edge-to-edge at its own proportions, filling the whole sheet — and available on gallery-wrapped canvas.














