TIMELESS MASTER

KING LOUIS XIII of France, a man of impeccable taste, insisted on having in his own bedroom the work of only one artist: he rightly considered Georges de La Tour, of Luneville in Lorraine, one of the great geniuses of his time.

Then came the age of the Roi Soleil, whose grandiloquent tastes did not run to the simple beauty of Georges de La Tour. In time, De La Tour's name disappeared completely--not only from France, but from all of Europe--and it was not until 1915 that two of his paintings were formally identified by the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Since World War II his popularity has soared--but even today only about 20 of his paintings are known to exist.

Of the nine attributed to him now hanging in the U.S., only three are authenticated beyond all reasonable doubt (see color). In 1948 Manhattan's Frick Collection bought The Education of the Virgin--a painting dominated not so much by the young Virgin or the brooding St. Anne as by the unearthly light shed by a candle that is partially shielded by the girl's translucent hand. In the Cleveland Museum's Repentant St. Peter, the spell is cast by a lantern that bathes St. Peter's ordeal in a glow of searing red that seems on the verge of bursting into flames. This summer Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art announced the purchase of The Fortune Teller--a canvas so finely preserved that it looks as if the master's brush had only just left it.

Georges Did It. Like St. Peter, which hung for years in Britain's Dulwich College and was considered of such small importance that the college did not even bother to catalogue it, The Fortune Teller belonged to a noble family of Lorraine that did not suspect the value of its treasure. Fourteen years ago a learned Benedictine monk "discovered'' the painting, noticed that it bore in the upper right-hand corner the bold and flourishing signature: "G. de La Tour Fecit Luneuilla Lother" (Luneville, Lorraine). The monk sent word to Paris, and the Louvre quickly offered to buy it. But the Louvre's bid was topped by Art Dealer Georges Wildenstein, who had somehow managed to get wind of the deal. Wildenstein whisked the painting out of sight, and no one knows to this day whether the rumor is true that he got it for only $28,000.

In 1957 Wildenstein persuaded the French authorities to let him take the painting to the U.S., and most of those who heard about the action thought the painting was going only to a temporary exhibition. This summer, when the news broke that the Metropolitan had bought it, the French press and public were stunned. Who was responsible for allowing such a masterpiece out of the country? Was it the Louvre, the Administration of National Museums, or, as some reports had it, "some authority higher?" Angry Deputies peppered Minister of Culture Andre Malraux with questions. "Everything in this affair." protested Le Monde, "is exceptional, strange and troubling."

The Innocent. The French have good reasons for regret: The Fortune Teller is a work, rare for De La Tour, of broad daylight, and it tells a touching and timeless tale. A young man listens somewhat disdainfully to an old crone telling his fortune. As he listens, a gypsy girl picks his pocket, and another is about to cut a gold medallion from his chain. For all the action, the familiar De La Tour stillness is there, as if creation itself were somehow holding its breath, waiting to see what will happen next. The outcome is no mystery. De La Tour's victim is every Young Innocent Abroad, at the age when innocence is most painful and most easily betrayed.

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