The Fortune-Teller

Georges de La Tour, born at Vic-sur-Seille in Lorraine and dead at Lunéville in 1652, stands apart from the great French painters of his century: a Caravaggesque who worked far from Paris and is remembered above all for a handful of candlelit night pieces. The Fortune-Teller belongs to the small group of his pictures set in daylight, and it turns on the oldest of comedies — a finely dressed young man, absorbed in having his palm read by an old gypsy woman, is quietly relieved of his purse by her companions. The subject was a favourite of the Caravaggesque painters on both sides of the Alps, and La Tour gives it the stillness, the firm simplified drawing and the grave, almost sculptural presence of his best work. One of his finest surviving genre scenes, it entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1960 with the Rogers Fund.