The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds

Georges de La Tour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds is a moral fable painted in the language of everyday life. A finely dressed young man sits at a card table where a cunning cheat hides an ace behind his back while a servant pours wine for the victim. La Tour’s characteristic candlelit clarity gives the scene a hushed, almost theatrical intensity, and the painting is among the most celebrated of the seventeenth-century French genre scenes that warn against vice.