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Fortune-Teller
Valentin de Boulogne French
Not on view
"You who take pleasure in [gypsies’] words, watch out for your dollars and dimes," warns a seventeenth-century source. Gypsy fortune-tellers were emblems of the deceptions of love and of life, the theme of this picture. The gesture of the figure at right makes us a witness-accomplice to his theft of a chicken—an allusion to the "plucking" that is going on! (Finding a visual equivalent for colloquial expressions was part of the appeal of these pictures.) The faceless figure with his back to us becomes everyman: the viewer. Each time Valentin treated this popular theme he did so with greater sophistication and psychological characterization, such as in Gathering in a Tavern (The Guileless Musician) and another Fortune-Teller, created ten years after this work, both on view nearby.
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