1626 marks the end of Nicolas Tournier's Roman period: from then on the artist became an "itinerant" painter erring between the great towns of Languedoc: Toulouse, Narbonne and Carcassonne, and further south to Béziers and Montpellier. Although the religious paintings for Narbonne and Toulouse constituted the core of his work, he never gave up his Caravaggesque genre scenes in which he reproduced the Roman themes for private commissions (see for example the Warsaw David. He also worked on the theme of Concerts; one of these paintings could be a representation of the family of his patron Bernard de Reich, Seigneur de Pennautier. From 1632-1638, he freed himself of subservience to any one particular genre and embarked on complex compositions, widening his field of references, as can be seen in the Passion scenes (the Narbonne Christ on the Cross, the Christ descended from the Cross and the Entombment of Christ at the Musée des Augustins), the Tobias and the Angel from Narbonne and the Bataille des roches rouges (musée des Augustins).
The painter tended increasingly towards stylisation and a diagrammatic line in the quest for a suspended, timeless universe. The austerity of his religious paintings is perhaps linked to the artist's protestant culture, unless it was a deliberate choice for the quiet restrained interior atmosphere reminiscent of French medieval art.
His tendency towards abstraction, his poetry and realism imbued with humanity, must make him one of the most singular and appealing personalities of his time.
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