The Fortune Teller

The Fortune Teller from 1653, now in the Munich Central Collecting Point, depicts a traveling palmist reading a client's future — a popular subject in Dutch and Flemish genre painting that carried implicit moral commentary on credulity, deception, and the human desire to know the unknowable. Fortune tellers were associated in 17th-century culture with both the traveling Romany populations who practiced the trade and the broader human tendency toward magical thinking that Protestant moralists repeatedly condemned. Steen's early treatment of the subject shows the influence of his training under Jan van Goyen, whose loose, atmospheric style he absorbed before developing a warmer and more precisely characterized approach under the influence of Gerrit Dou. The 1653 date places this among Steen's early works, painted when he was establishing his career in Leiden before his later movements to Delft, Haarlem, and back to Leiden. The fortune teller subject allowed him to explore social dynamics of deception and belief that would recur throughout his career, from the quack doctor who peddles fraudulent cures to the lovers who deceive each other in his courtship scenes. The Munich work is an early example of the morally complex genre subjects that would define his life's work.

The genre scene shows Steen's early style, with careful attention to costume and gesture that convey the interaction between credulous client and shrewd fortune teller.