The Cheat With The Ace Of Clubs

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Shannon Drane Matthew Guest Art Appreciation 12/6/10 The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs, George de La Tour, 1620’s George de La Tour’s Cheat with the Ace of Clubs was one of the greatest masterpieces of seventeenth-century. La Tour a French artist created several brilliant pieces of artwork. The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs was created some time in the late 1620’s. It is 38-1/2 x 61-1/2 in. (97.8 x 156.2 cm). When I laid my eyes on this painting I couldn’t stop starring at it. La Tour used oil on canvas as his medium of choice for this particular piece. He configured this painting with precise precision, depth and representational style. La Tour used a painting technique called, trompe l’oeil, French terminology for, “fool the eye.” La Tour obviously used this technique before William Harnett came along. This particular technique gives the painting a very unusual appearance where some of the objects look like they are glued onto the canvas. There are a lot of details and depth in this painting. The women’s hats with the feathers, the jewelry, the wine bottle, coins on the table, the cards behind the tricksters back just to name a few. La Tour carefully and artistically arranged the subjects in a way that the texture causes the viewer to develop an impulse to touch the piece. The pronounced facial expressions definitely give you the illusion that this is a real picture reflecting real people. It is in fact a made up thought that was in the mind of La Tour that he brought to life in this painting. La Tour’s dazzling color selections and elaborate costumes create a brilliant tableau. His characters enact a psychological drama that unfolds through the cues of their sidelong gazes and the measured gestures that signal their next moves. The cheat tips his cards toward the viewer, who thereby becomes complicit in the scheme, knowing that in the next moment, the
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