la tour’s fortune teller--8/8/25
Today's selection-- from What Great Paintings Say by Rainer & Rose-Marie Hagen. Rediscovered in 1960, The Fortune Teller is the 1630 masterpiece by French artist Georges de La Tour (1593–1652), influenced by the Italian artist Michelangelo Caravaggio. A French cultural treasure, it was purchased by and now resides at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—a controversial result.
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“A French masterpiece was once secretly smuggled out of France. In 1960 the New York Metropolitan Museum bought The Fortune Teller, a work attributed to Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), for an unknown but ‘very high sum of money.’ When the affair became publicly known, critics raised their voices in the French press against this sordid victory of the dollar, complaining of irretrievable loss to the ‘national heritage.’ The Minister of Culture, Andre Malraux, attempted to explain to parliament how the Louvre had let the opportunity to acquire such a treasure slip by unnoticed. It was never fully explained how a licence to export the painting had been acquired in the first place; the head of the Louvre Old Masters department at the time remained silent.
“Hardly anyone had seen the painting before 1960, and the story of its discovery is mysterious. In 1942, so the story goes, a monograph on the works of La Tour entered the hands of a French prisoner-of-war. The reproductions in the book reminded him of an old painting which hung at his uncle's castle. When the war was over, he had the painting examined by a priest who had an expert understanding of art. The latter, concluding that the painting was a genuine La Tour, informed the Louvre. Secret negotiations were then conducted to arrange for the purchase of the work. However, the art dealer Georges Wilden stein outbid the Louvre, finally buying The Fortune Teller in 1949 for 7.5 million francs. The painting then remained in his possession for the next ten years, accessible only to a small number of experts. In 1960, the Metropolitan Museum presented its sensational acquisition to the public for the first time.
“It portrays a 17th-century picaresque scene: four sly thieves in the act of robbing a young man. The latter's attention is fully occupied by an old woman who is about to tell his fortune by reading his palm. He is thus unaware that he is the victim of a plot: while one girl is removing his purse from his pocket, her accomplice's hand is already held out to spirit it away; at the same time, a pale skinned beauty is cutting a gold medal from the chain around his neck. The protagonists are turned to face the spectator like actors on a stage; indeed, it is quite possible that the artist borrowed the scene from a play. According to experts at the Metropolitan Museum, the oil painting is in ‘excellent condition.’ The sweeping calligraphy of the signature ‘G. de La Tour Fecit Luneuilla Lorhar’ in the top right of the painting proves it to be the original work of the artist, who spent most of his life in the small Lotharingian town of Lunevilie. The details of his life are obscure. At the beginning of the 20th century only his name and two paintings were known. In the meantime, however, several dates and various other faces have been found in archives, and in 1972, at the first major La Tour exhibition at Paris, 30 paintings were attributed to his hand.
“The Fortune Teller is one of the few spectacular ‘daylit paintings’ of an artist whose reputation, until the 1930s, rested entirely on his execution of candle-lit nocturnal scenes:
“In spite of his military-style doublet, the richly dressed young man has rather a babyish face. He is probably still a student at one of the colleges visited by wealthy, upper-class boys until -- at the age of fifteen -- they were introduced to the world of adults. Contact with the adult world must have started for many of them at an early age, however, for ‘before they even reach Aristotle's lessons on restraint,’ according to the essayist Michel de Montaigne, ‘a hundred schoolboys already have syphilis.’
“There would certainly be no shortage of places to contract such diseases -- inns, hostelries and brothels -- within even a short distance of the college gates. La Tour has not defined where the scene in his painting is taking place; perhaps the old woman will not be content with her for tune telling, but will attempt to prostitute one of her young accomplices to the young man. Their dark skin, black hair and richly coloured Oriental dress show the old woman and two girls on the left to be so-called ‘gypsies’ -- a term common at that time but no longer used today.
“La Tour's contemporary, the Lorraine artist Jacques Callot, portrayed them in similar fashion in some of his etchings. Callot is reported to have accompanied an itinerant group as far as Rome after running away from home at the age of twelve. He was discovered there by merchants from Nancy and sent home to his parents.”
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