Trophime Bigot

Trophime Bigot painted by candlelight. His best-known pictures show a few figures around a single flame, faces lit from close by and everything else falling into deep shadow, in the manner that followers of Caravaggio spread across Europe. He is known as the Candlelight Master.

He was born in Arles in Provence in 1579 and worked in Rome from about 1620 to 1634, when most of his intimate candlelit scenes were made. He then returned to the south of France, painting more conventional altarpieces in Aix-en-Provence, Arles and Avignon, where he died in 1650. For a long time scholars thought his work came from two different artists, and only in the late 1980s was it accepted as one man. A Doctor Examining Urine is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and a Saint Jerome is in the Palazzo Corsini in Rome.

Notice how much of each picture is left in darkness.