The Musicians' Brawl

Long before Georges de La Tour became famous for his hushed candlelit saints, he painted brawling beggars in flat daylight, and this is one of them, from about 1625. Two elderly street musicians have come to blows. The one on the left is blind, or claims to be, and the man lunging at him squeezes a lemon toward his eyes, an old trick for exposing a beggar who only pretends he cannot see. A shawm, ancestor of the oboe, is raised like a club. La Tour records every rotten tooth and leathery wrinkle without a trace of pity. The picture was long given to Caravaggio, whose harsh realism it echoes, and only reassigned to La Tour in 1958. The Getty bought it in 1973.