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| Georges de La Tour Job Visited by His Wife ca. 1630 oil on canvas Musée départemental d'Art Ancien et Contemporain, Épinal |
"He had come to look once more, as he had often done before, at the sublime painting, Job Visited by His Wife at the Musée of Épinal. He parked his car and went in.
He was well known to the receptionist who gave him a sunny greeting as he passed the desk.
'No schoolchildren today,' she said. Sometimes when there were school-groups or art-college students in the gallery Harvey would turn away, not even attempting to see the picture. But very often there were only one or two visitors. Sometimes, he had the museum to himself; he was already half-way up the stairs when the receptionist told him so; she watched him approvingly, even admiringly, as he ran up the staircase, as if even his long legs, when they reached the first turning of the stairs, had brought a touch of pleasure into her morning. The dark-blue custodian with his hands behind his back as he made his stately round, nodded familiarly as Harvey reached the second floor; as usual the man went to sit patiently on a chair at the other end of the room as Harvey took his usual place on a small bench in front of the picture.
The painting was made in the first part of the seventeenth century by Georges de La Tour, a native of Lorraine. It bears a resemblance to the Dutch candle-light pictures of the time. Its colours and organization are superb. It is extremely simple, and like so much great art of the past, surprisingly modern.
Job visité par sa femme: to Harvey's mind there was much more in the painting to illuminate the subject of Job than in many of the lengthy commentaries that he knew so well. It was eloquent of a new idea, and yet, where had the painter found justification for his treatment of the subject?
Job's wife, tall, sweet-faced, with the intimation of a beautiful body inside the large tent-like case of her firm clothes, bending, long-necked, solicitous over Job. In her hand is a lighted candle. It is night, it is winter; Job's wife wears a glorious red tunic over her dress. Job sits on a plain cube-shaped block. He might be in front of a fire, for the light of the candle alone cannot explain the amount of light that is cast on the two figures. Job is naked except for a loin-cloth. He clasps his hands above his knees. His body seems to shrink, but it is the shrunkenness of pathos rather than want. Beside him is the piece of broken pottery that he has taken to scrape his wounds. His beard is thick. He is not an old man. Both are in their early prime, a couple in their thirties. (Indeed, their recently-dead children were not yet married.) His face looks up at his wife, sensitive, imploring some favour, urging some cause. What is his wife trying to tell him as she bends her sweet face towards him? What does he beg, this stricken man, so serene in his faith, so accomplished in argument?
The scene here seemed to Harvey so altogether different from that suggested by the text of Job, and yet so deliberately and intelligently contemplated that it was impossible not to wonder what the artist actually meant. Harvey stared at the picture and recalled the verses that followed the account of Job's affliction with boils:
And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal, and he sat down among the ashes.
Then said his wife to him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die.
But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.
But what is she saying to him, Job's wife, in the serious, simple and tender portrait of Georges de La Tour? The text of the poem is full of impatience, anger; it is as if she is possessed by Satan. 'Dost thou still retain thine integrity?' She seems to gloat. 'Curse God and die.' Harvey recalled that one of the standard commentators has suggested a special interpretation, something to the effect, 'Are you still going to be so righteous? If you're going to die, curse God and get if off your chest first. It will do you good.' But even this, perhaps homely, advice doesn't fit in with the painting. Of course, the painter was idealizing some notion of his own; in his dream, Job and his wife are deeply in love.
Some people had just arrived in the museum; Harvey could hear voices downstairs and footsteps mounting. He continued to regard the picture, developing his thoughts: Here, she is by no means the carrier of Satan's message. She comes to comfort Job, reduced as he is to a mental and physical wreck. 'You speak,' he tells her, 'as one of the foolish women'; that is to say, he doesn't call her a foolish woman, he rather implies that she isn't speaking as her normal self. And he puts it to her, 'Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?' That domestic 'we' is worth noticing, thought Harvey, he doesn't mean to abandon his wife, he has none of the hostility towards her that he has, later, for his friends."
– Muriel Spark, from The Only Problem (1984)
Note: according to the museum in Épinal, the title of this picture is Job Mocked by His Wife, which would seem to upend Spark's interpretation (as channeled through Harvey). Clearly, the author's actual encounter with this out-of-the-way and little-known work of art was the seed that sprouted into The Only Problem. Her cast of characters was imagined subsequently, in response to the painting. One guesses she was also aware that curators and scholars do identify mockery rather than compassion as animating La Tour's painted Wife, just as painterly tradition demanded.