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The Fortune Teller | Georges de La Tour | c. 1630

The Fortune Teller | Georges de La Tour | c. 1630

€32,95
€32,95
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About the artwork:

The Fortune Teller by Georges de La Tour, painted around 1630, presents a carefully staged scene in which a young aristocrat consults a group of women who appear to be telling his fortune, while in reality they are robbing him. The composition is structured with remarkable clarity, each figure positioned almost parallel to the picture plane, which gives the scene a theatrical stillness. La Tour, a leading figure of the French Baroque, was influenced by Caravaggio’s realism, yet his approach is more controlled and silent. Here, light is even and restrained, allowing the viewer to focus on the subtle gestures of the hands as they remove the young man’s purse and cut his pocket. The painting functions as both a genre scene and a moral warning about vanity, naivety, and social deception. Today it is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and it remains one of La Tour’s most compelling explorations of illusion and human vulnerability.

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  • Title The Fortune Teller (La Diseuse de bonne aventure)
  • Artist Georges de La Tour (French Baroque painter of Caravaggesque genre and religious chiaroscuro nocturnes by candlelight; Vic-sur-Seille, Duchy of Lorraine, baptised 14 March 1593 - Lunéville, 30 January 1652; in his own lifetime court painter to King Louis XIII and Duke Charles IV of Lorraine; almost entirely forgotten after his death until rediscovered by the German scholar Hermann Voss in 1915)
  • Year of creation c. 1630-1635 (the date remains disputed within the artist's career — older scholarship dated the picture as late as the early 1640s, but recent scholarship tends to place it earlier, in the late 1620s or first half of the 1630s, as a relatively youthful exercise in the international Caravaggesque genre manner that La Tour shared with Valentin de Boulogne, Nicolas Régnier and the Utrecht Caravaggisti. The composition is one of the supreme Caravaggesque day-lit genre scenes of the seventeenth century: a fashionably dressed young gentleman, callow and supremely self-confident in his richly slashed and embroidered doublet, has his fortune told by a withered, deeply lined old gypsy woman at the right, who reads the coin she has just received from him while two younger gypsy accomplices on the left close in behind his back to cut the strings of his purse and slide a gold medal off his chain. A fifth figure, a fair-haired young woman to the left, watches the trick with cool calculation. The picture is a moralising warning against the deceptions and vanities of youth and the pickpocketing tricks of gypsies, then a stock subject of seventeenth-century European literature and theatre, but La Tour transforms what could be a vulgar genre scene into a stark, monumental, almost frieze-like composition of five half-length figures, brilliantly lit by a single broad daylight from the left and locked together by a network of subtle glances and silent gestures. The painting belongs to La Tour's so-called "daylight" or diurnal manner, distinguished from his more famous nocturnal candlelit pictures of the 1640s; together with The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds at the Louvre and the various Hurdy-Gurdy Players, it is one of his greatest day-lit canvases. The authenticity of the Met's signature has occasionally been questioned, but the prevailing scholarly view today accepts the picture as autograph)
  • Technique/Medium Oil on canvas (signed and inscribed upper right: "G. de La Tour Fecit / Luneuilla Lothar." — "Made by G. de La Tour, Lunéville in Lorraine")
  • Original dimensions 101.9 x 123.5 cm
  • Collection/Museum Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Rogers Fund, accession 60.30; acquired in 1960 amid considerable controversy — the picture's purchase by the Met from the Wildenstein gallery in Paris provoked a major diplomatic protest from French art-historical circles, since the painting had been exported from France without an export licence on the grounds that it was a worthless studio copy, and only the recently formed Comité Georges de La Tour had recognised it as autograph; François Mitterrand, then a deputy, raised the question in the National Assembly)

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