The Fortune-Teller

Five figures, one dupe, and a picture that has been fought over twice. A rich young man has his palm read by an old woman while three younger ones cut his purse and lift the medal from his chain. It is signed at the upper right with the painter's name and his town, Luneville in Lorraine, and it carries the words AMOR and FIDES on the victim's watch chain.

It surfaced in a chateau in the Sarthe after the Second World War, was bought in 1949 by Georges Wildenstein for 7,500,000 francs over the head of the Louvre, and left France for New York in 1960. How it left became a matter for the National Assembly, where Andre Malraux had to account for it; the export licence had been signed by Germain Bazin, the Louvre's own head of old master paintings. Twenty years later Christopher Wright and Diana de Marly declared it a modern forgery in the Connoisseur, CBS put the charge on television, and the Met answered with pigments, x-rays and a French probate inventory of 1879.

What is happening in the picture

Oil on canvas, 101.9 by 123.5 centimetres. Five three-quarter-length figures crowd the whole width of the frame with almost no space behind them. A young man in a slashed doublet and a broad collar holds out a coin to an old woman who is reading his palm and telling him his fortune. While he looks at her, the three younger women around him work: one cuts the purse strings, one takes the medal from the chain across his chest, one watches the door.

La Tour has made the theft legible and the victim's face oblivious, and he has given the young man's watch chain two words in gold: AMOR and FIDES, love and faith. They are being lifted off him as they are read.

The picture is a daylight subject, not one of the candlelit night scenes La Tour is best known for. That is part of why it took the twentieth century so long to place it in his work, and part of why it was attacked when it was.

The signature is a place, and the place is a date

At the upper right the canvas is signed G. de La Tour Fecit Luneuilla Lothar. That is: made by G. de La Tour at Luneville in Lorraine. La Tour set up his studio in Luneville in 1620 and died there in 1652, and the inscription is the only one of its kind in his surviving work that names the town in that form.

Francois-Georges Pariset, publishing the picture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin in March 1961, built a date on that inscription. He argued the picture must precede 1633, the year the duchy of Lorraine came under French domination, on the ground that La Tour would not have advertised himself as a Luneville artist of Lorraine after that. He read the signature as a kind of shop sign put out soon after the studio opened. Benedict Nicolson and Christopher Wright reached the same conclusion from the other end in 1974: that La Tour was unlikely to boast of being a Luneville artist once he was established there, and dated the picture about 1620 to 1621.

The Met's own catalogue entry now says it has been variously dated between 1620 and 1639 and is most likely from the 1630s. The signature is therefore evidence that everybody agrees on and nobody can convert into a year.

A prisoner of war, a monograph and a priest

The picture has no recorded modern discovery in a saleroom. The account that circulates, and that the Met's own literature does not contradict, is that a French prisoner of war saw La Tour's work reproduced in a monograph, recognised the resemblance to a picture hanging in a relative's chateau, and that a priest who knew what he was looking at identified it and told the Louvre.

Hermann Voss had only rediscovered La Tour as an artistic personality in 1915. A painter who had been effectively invisible for two and a half centuries acquired a literature within one generation, and the literature is what allowed a soldier to recognise a picture on a wall. That sequence matters for the forgery argument that followed: the picture emerged in the narrow window between La Tour becoming identifiable and La Tour becoming expensive.

Vitale Bloch put the first note into print in his 1950 book on La Tour, recording that there was a Waarzegster, a fortune teller, in France, and suggesting it was the pendant to the Cheat now in the Louvre. Charles Sterling, reviewing him in 1951, added the detail that gives the game away about who then controlled it: the owner did not wish the picture to be published just yet.

The Louvre was outbid

The Louvre entered negotiations to buy the painting from the de Gastines heirs. Georges Wildenstein outbid the museum and bought it in 1949 for 7,500,000 francs.

That is the whole of the French grievance in one sentence, and it is worth stating plainly because the subsequent scandal is usually told as though the picture were smuggled. It was not taken from a museum. It was bought in open competition from a private family by a dealer with more money than the national museum, in a country still rebuilding, and it then sat in his stock for eleven years.

How it left France, and who signed

In 1960 the Metropolitan Museum bought it from Wildenstein for a sum that has never been published. The French press treated the export as a scandal. Andre Malraux, then Minister of Culture, had to explain to the National Assembly why the picture had not ended up in the Louvre.

The answer, when it emerged, was awkward. The export licence had been signed by Germain Bazin, the head of old master paintings at the Louvre itself. Christopher Wright, who twenty years later would argue the picture was a fake, speculated that Bazin had enough doubt about it not to want it for his own museum. That speculation is Wright's, it is unproved, and it is recorded here as his rather than as a finding.

The contemporary paper trail is thick and easy to check. Art News announced the purchase in the summer of 1960 as a spectacular buy for the Metropolitan. Weltkunst reported in July 1960 on a storm of indignation over the museum's new acquisition. Connaissance des arts ran a piece in August 1960 on the exile of works of art, following up an article of the previous February. Three trade journals in three languages, all within three months.

The costume attack, 1970

Diana de Marly opened the authenticity case in the Burlington Magazine in June 1970. Her argument was specialist and, on its face, strong: the costume details in the Fortune-Teller are completely at variance with the dress of the 1620s, she wrote, and she listed anachronisms. Her conclusion was that the picture was unlikely to have been executed by La Tour at any time in his career.

The Met's response was to bring in other costume specialists rather than to argue style. Donald King replied in the Burlington in October 1970 that the old woman's patterned mantle was technically unexceptionable and rendered so accurately that the painter must have studied the actual textile. Emma Mellencamp published a refutation in 1971 arguing that the costumes are demonstrably consistent with the art of the period. Stella Blum, head of the Met's own Costume Institute, later demonstrated that many of the details de Marly criticised appear in other, unquestioned La Tours.

The costume argument is a good illustration of a general rule in attribution disputes: an expert in one discipline can produce a devastating objection inside their field which turns out, when other people in the same field are asked, not to be the consensus of that field at all.

Fake?, 1980, and the word in the embroidery

In September 1980 Christopher Wright and Diana de Marly published Fake? in the Connoisseur, with the picture in colour on the cover. They argued the picture was psychologically weak, unlike La Tour's other work, that the signature was suspect, that the details of costume were wrong, and that the face of the young man was in fact a woman's face of about 1940.

Their single most quotable point was that the word MERDE had been painted into the collar of the figure on the left. A vulgarity concealed in the embroidery of a seventeenth-century picture is not the sort of claim that stays inside a specialist journal, and it did not. CBS took it to television.

The rebuttals came from several directions at once. John Pope-Hennessy disputed the whole thesis in Apollo in November 1980. John Brealey and Pieter Meyers published the technical case in the Burlington in July 1981, with colour plates and an x-radiograph, stating that scientific examination and pigment tests convincingly demonstrated the work to be of considerable age. Philippe de Montebello, the Met's director, wrote a piece in the Connoisseur in June 1982 headed Where 60 Minutes Erred, in which he said he had no doubt the picture is autograph and offered a specific account of the graffito: a mischievous restorer, having isolated the original paint under a layer of varnish, had joined up several original decorative brushstrokes. Richard Spear wrote privately in March 1982 that the CBS coverage was irresponsible and misleading and listed its disregard for available evidence. Brian Sewell, in the Burlington in September 1981, remained unconvinced by the technical evidence, and Wright returned to the charge in the Connoisseur in November 1982.

The document that ended it

What settled the argument was not a pigment. It was a French probate inventory.

Pierre Rosenberg published in the Burlington Magazine in August 1981 the 1879 posthumous inventory of Edouard Lemonnier de Loriere, which lists a large picture signed G. de La Tour representing the Bonaventure, valued at two hundred and fifty francs. His argument was short. It is inconceivable, he wrote, that a forger could have painted a false La Tour in the nineteenth century. In 1879 Georges de La Tour was a name almost nobody knew; Hermann Voss would not reassemble the artist for another thirty-six years. There was no market to forge into.

Anthony Blunt, reviewing the literature of the previous ten years in the Burlington in November 1982, wrote that the controversy seemed definitely settled in the picture's favour by three things: the 1879 inventory, the museum's technical evidence, and the hanging of the picture next to the Cheat with the Ace of Clubs at the Grand Palais, which he said proved beyond doubt that the two are by the same hand.

The chain of documents that saved the attribution is the same chain that this record grades as provenance. That is the argument for keeping provenance properly, made by the object itself.

The canvas was cut, and it has been added to

The picture is not the shape La Tour left it. The left side of the canvas has been trimmed, and a strip roughly 6 centimetres deep has been added at the top, above the signature. Nicolson and Wright reported in 1974 that the canvas had originally been folded over at the top by some five centimetres and that the balance of the composition has been upset by the loss of a strip along the left-hand side. Daniel Wildenstein's memoir states that it was cut at the left so that it would fit its frame.

That last detail is the ordinary, unglamorous way pictures are damaged: not by war or theft but by a frame that was the wrong size and a household that preferred to alter the painting. It also bears directly on the pendant question, because the picture's original proportions would have been closer to those of the two Cheats.

The pendant question

La Tour painted the same moral situation twice more, in the Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds now in the Louvre and the Cheat with the Ace of Clubs now in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. A young man is fleeced at cards in both. The proposal that the Fortune-Teller was conceived as a pendant to one of them has been made repeatedly, first by Bloch in 1950.

The evidence is inconclusive and the objections are precise. Wolfgang Prohaska pointed out in 1987 that the Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds and the Fortune-Teller are signed differently, and considered them an unlikely pair; he added that if the Kimbell picture seems the closer match it may only be because the two had recently been restored by the same hand. Hugh Brigstocke reported in 1982 that John Brealey found the technique of the Louvre Cheat identical to that of the Fort Worth version and of this picture.

Restoration history contaminating a stylistic judgement is a hazard that applies to a great many pendant claims and is almost never stated as openly as Prohaska stated it here.

Who the women are, and what the picture is doing

The subject was common across sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe and Caravaggio made it famous in this half-length format; two of his versions survive, in the Pinacoteca Capitolina in Rome and the Louvre. La Tour's composition, however, comes out of prints rather than out of Caravaggio. Pariset identified the woman on the right as derived from an etching by Jacques de Bellange and the old woman from an engraving by Jasper de Isaac, and Edward Sullivan later compared the costumes to Jacques Callot's series Les Bohemiens.

The figures are Roma. The Met's own catalogue entry now says so, and notes that the word used in the historical titles and in most of the literature on this picture is a slur. The entry is also explicit about what the image does: it played into a kind of internal European ethnography that othered populations seen as not essentially French or Italian, and it was built to make the viewer both attracted and repelled at once, by the clothes and the young women on one hand and by the old woman's face and the theft on the other.

Several writers have read the scene as an episode from the parable of the Prodigal Son, and as an animated vanitas. Raymond Picard argued this in 1972 and Francois Solesmes in 1973 in relation to this picture and the Cheat. That is an argued reading held by named scholars. What the picture certainly is, in the terms of its own century, is a moral lesson delivered as an anecdote, which is how Theodore Rousseau described it and the Cheat together in the Splendid Century catalogue in 1960.

Where it has been since

For a picture whose export caused a parliamentary question, the Fortune-Teller has spent a great deal of the last sixty-five years back in Europe on loan. It went to the Orangerie in 1972, to the Pushkin in Moscow in 1975, to the Grand Palais in 1982 and again in 1997, to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 1987 for an exhibition built around this one painting, to Washington and Fort Worth in 1996 and 1997, to the Grand Palais for Bohemes in 2012, to the Prado in 2016 and to Brisbane, Osaka and Tokyo in 2021 and 2022.

The Vienna show of 1987 is the striking one. Seventeen years after de Marly first questioned it and seven years after Wright called it a fake, a major European museum built an exhibition around the disputed picture alone. Loan history is an underused index of institutional confidence, and this one records the moment the doubt stopped mattering.