女占い師

By 1630 Georges de La Tour was working in Lunéville, in the duchy of Lorraine, a small independent territory wedged between France and the Holy Roman Empire and about to be crushed by both in the Thirty Years' War. Here he paints a young man having his palm read by an old gypsy woman while three younger women crowd around him. Look at their hands. One girl lifts a medal from a chain at his neck, another slides a purse out of his pocket, a third is cutting it free. The boy stares at the crone and never notices. It is a con in progress, the kind of street scene moralists of the day loved as a warning to gullible sons. La Tour dresses the thieves in astonishing fabrics, the striped Oriental shawl at the right woven with a border of tiny figures. The picture surfaced only in the 20th century and hung unrecognized in a French château before the Metropolitan bought it in 1960.