[2] The Louvre version of the painting was bought in 1949 from the French Administration des Douanes.

Georges de La Tour was a Catholic Baroque artist with a successful career, despite the fact that he was working at an unsettling time of religious wars and the violence that followed.

He learned many skills from the work of Caravaggio such as tenebrism, an especially dramatic contrast between light and shadow.

Like Caravaggio, de La Tour was interested in low-life, hoaxers, thieves and swindlers.

In the 1630s, during the Thirty Years War, La Tour spent time in Paris painting for Cardinal Richelieu.

He also painted for King Louis XIII and presented him with a Night Scene with Saint Sebastian.

She was the perfect lover of Christ, her beauty was made more appealing because of her repentance, which had a special attraction for a period so passionately interested in problems of mysticism, quietism and asceticism.

Most of Georges de La Tour's paintings were influenced by Caravaggio and his followers from Rome.

Caravaggio's followers spread throughout other European countries; therefore, it was not necessary for Georges de La Tour to travel to Italy.

Georges de La Tour took Caravaggio's style of tenebrism and made it into something new and entirely his own.

He brought many characteristics of mystery, tranquil grandeur, and silence into his artwork which brings it closer to French classical art and literature.

Magdalene at the Mirror (National Gallery of Art) is an oil on-canvas painting created circa 1635–1640.

[1] Magdalene with Two Flames (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) is an oil-on-canvas painting created between 1625 and 1650.