Le Joueur de vielle à la mouche

Georges de La Tour worked in Lorraine, a small duchy the Thirty Years' War was grinding through with famine, plague and marauding armies in the 1630s. Beggars and broken soldiers filled the roads, and La Tour painted them close up and life-size, with none of the charm other artists lent the poor. Here a blind old man grinds out a tune on a hurdy-gurdy, a wooden instrument cranked by a handle at its side, his face slack and his clothes worn to rags. This is one of La Tour's daylight pictures, not the candlelit night scenes he is better known for, so every wrinkle and thread is laid bare. Somewhere on the old man's coat the painter has set a single fly, so lifelike that it has given the picture its name.