Saint Jérôme

This Saint Jerome of 1643 reflects the Le Nain brothers' capacity to move between their celebrated peasant genre scenes and devotional figure paintings. Saint Jerome — the scholarly Desert Father who translated the Bible into Latin — was a popular subject in European devotional painting, depicted in contemplation with skull, lion, and crucifix. Le Nain's approach to the subject is characteristically sober, stripping away Baroque theatrics in favor of concentrated meditation.

Jerome is shown in a spare setting with his traditional attributes — a skull and an open book — illuminated by a focused light source. The palette is restrained and monumental, with the saint's aged face and hands rendered with the same unsparing realism found in Le Nain's peasant subjects.