40 GEORGES DE LA TOUR The subject of The Beggars' Brawl is the fight of two elderly itinerant musicians over a French, 1593-1652 place to play their instruments. The man on the left, with a hurdy-gurdy slung around The Beggars' Brawl, his shoulders, is defending himself with a knife and the crank of his instrument. He is circa 1625-30 menaced by another man who seems to be hitting him with a shawm, a kind of oboe, Oil on canvas and who wears a similar instrument at his waist. The second beggar squeezes the juice 85.7 x 141 cm (33¾ x 55½ in.) of a lemon into his opponent's eyes, either to test whether the man with the hurdy- 72.PA.28 gurdy is truly blind or simply to further agitate him. On the left an old woman seems to implore someone to help. At the right two more beggars, one with a violin and the other with a bagpipe, enjoy the fight. The subject is a rare one; many seventeenth-century artists painted peasants or musicians, but depictions of quarrels among them are hardly ever found. One of the few examples is a print by the French artist Jacques Bellange that may have supplied the inspiration for the Museum's painting. La Tour used motifs from Bellange's prints on other occasions and obviously admired him. La Tour spent his life in Lorraine in eastern France and is not known to have ventured far from there. His style, therefore, is based upon whatever works he might have seen in or near the relatively small city of Luneville where he lived, and it is not surprising that prints should have been a major source of his inspiration. The violinist on the right in the Museum's painting may in fact be derived from a print by the Dutch artist Hendrick ter Brugghen, which depicts a grinning man in a striped coat holding a violin and wearing a feathered cap. The print probably dates from the mid-to-late 1620s, as does La Tour's painting. In a more general way La Tour's work belongs to the realist tradition that swept Europe in the aftermath of the very revolutionary pictures painted by Caravaggio in Italy. It is doubtful that La Tour ever saw any original paintings by Caravaggio, but the desire for a renewal of naturalism in painting was so strong that it quickly found adherents everywhere. BF FRENCH SCHOOL 75