The Fortune Teller, c.1635 Georges de La Tour (1593-1652)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Georges de La Tour also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Fortune Teller is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A pale hand lies open, trusting, as if it has never been disappointed. Into that palm an old woman leans, her mouth slightly pursed, her gaze sharp. Around them, the air feels held in the throat.

Georges de La Tour stages The Fortune Teller like a small, tightly packed drama pressed up against the picture plane. Five figures, almost shoulder to shoulder, are set before a plain brown ground that gives nothing away: no street, no tent, no hint of escape. This compression is part of the trap. The young man in the centre wears a sand-coloured doublet tied with a soft red sash, and his expression is oddly blank, the face of someone enjoying attention without noticing the cost.

Look at the eyes. The so-called clients and attendants rarely meet the boy’s gaze; they glance sideways, diagonally, at one another. Those darting looks become the real narrative. One woman on the left, in a patterned headscarf, works at his purse with practiced calm, while another, partly hidden behind him, seems to draw a chain or medallion away from his waist. The fortune-teller’s hand performs a second trick: she points as if explaining his future, yet her other hand hovers near coins, already weighing the present. Perhaps Tour wants us to feel how easily “meaning” can be manufactured when we are flattered by it.

Color is doing social work here. Rosy sleeves, creamy whites, and the warm, bread-brown of skin are set against smoky blacks and deep reds, each fabric described with loving exactness. Notice a close detail: the gold embroidery along the young man’s collar is painted in tiny, broken touches, like brief sparks, while the old woman’s cheek is modeled with thin, dry layers that make her wrinkles feel earned rather than caricatured. The light is steady, not theatrical candlelight, but it still has a Baroque clarity, recalling Caravaggio’s streetwise scenes without copying their swagger. Georges de La Tour, working in northeastern France and even inscribing his hometown on the canvas, seems to arrive at this cool intensity by his own route.

Standing before it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York USA, one might even hear the faint rasp of cloth and the soft clink of metal. Tour doesn’t shout. He lets deception unfold with the quiet certainty of everyday life.