The Fortune-Teller

When it was painted

In the 1630s La Tour was around forty and settled in Lunéville, a small town in the Duchy of Lorraine. He was a baker's son. He had married Diane Le Nerf, the daughter of a noble family, and moved to her hometown. The Duke of Lorraine even granted him special tax privileges.

Those were not peaceful years. Armies of the Thirty Years' War marched through Lorraine, plague broke out, and from 1633 French troops occupied the duchy. In 1638 Lunéville burned. The next year La Tour turned up in Paris with the title of painter to the King of France.

A fortune-teller working with pickpockets was a familiar story. The Met explains that the theme had spread through prints in northern Europe and through Caravaggio's paintings in Rome. La Tour took the old tale and packed his canvas with five faces and their busy hands.

La Tour died in Lunéville in 1652, and his name slipped almost completely out of memory. In 1915 the German scholar Hermann Voss began to gather his pictures together again and bring the painter back. This canvas surfaced in a private collection in France in the middle of the twentieth century.

When the Metropolitan Museum bought it in 1960, there was an uproar in France. People asked how such a picture had been allowed to leave the country, and the culture minister, André Malraux, had to answer the question in the National Assembly.

Look again at the signature in the upper right corner. La Tour wrote the name of his own town, Lunéville, into the paint. That small line of script has ended up on a wall across the ocean in New York.