A Fortune-Teller

By 1777 Joshua Reynolds was the most powerful figure in British art, the first president of the new Royal Academy and the portraitist every duke and duchess wanted. But alongside those grand commissions he made looser things he called fancy pictures, scenes of ordinary life, and for the children in them he simply used boys and girls off the London streets. This is one of them. A fortune-teller leans in to read the hand of a young girl who sits on her sweetheart's knee. A newspaper that saw it that spring reported she is being told she will soon be married, and laughs, too young to quite understand. Watch the young man's face, which the same writer thought looked less than delighted. Reynolds borrowed the whole arrangement from a Caravaggio in Paris, and the Englishman who bought the picture was Britain's ambassador there, who knew that Caravaggio well.