How can a George de la Tour painting develop your psyche?

              Five Ways a George de la Tour develops your psyche.

The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs by George de la Tour

'The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs' is all about a bigger picture than that which is hidden within the frame of this painting.  He was a master of telling a bigger story by just using objects.  La Tour understands very well that people cannot hide their transgressions for long.  Finally truth is revealed.... the big eye sees all.  In this painting, the viewer is in the privileged, God-like position of being allowed to see the cheating too.  We can all see the man hiding his ace of clubs.  We are allowed to dwell on a transgression and hopefully develop our own psyche from doing so.  

Secondly, La Tour shows that there is more 'cheating' going on. Look at the eyes of the maid,  dodgy as can be, also involved in the cheating, possibly sexual cheating.  She is aware of the cheating and not letting on.  

La Tour uses here a method of revealing the inner psychology that modern thinkers call phenomenology.  Just an object can create an idea of what it signifies.  Heidegger said that we should simply look at the ideas behind our everydayness and that it is the five senses around us can hold ideas. 

Thirdly, suspician is on the eyes of the woman, and gold lies on the table to be played for, for there is an exchange of money.  These objects could trigger the mind into thinking there is an exchange of love and sex for money.

Fourthly the game itself: gambling; is a sin.  The game takes place in a secret place, which only we the viewer sees, just as does 'God' see all things that we believe are hidden and will bring them to light.

Fifthly, there is the idea that the cards are symbolic of chance.  The young naive man on the right is being initiated into what he thinks is an innocent flutter of a game with honest rules, with a hope that luck and chance might be his.   He is a new recruit to this complicity.   But what we see is someone being led astray.,... and that there is going to be no good luck for him.  Again we are given the privileged position of seeing an outcome of someone's choices.

 The development and growth of the human psyche is a very ordered thing, and though we think we may be 'above' it, growth takes place, through the organization of objects (the cards)

The painting is not only enlightening about human psychology, but uses objects to explore  the ideas behind our own choices and behaviour.

The poet William Carlos Williams also explored this idea.  He said there were "No ideas but in things"

He was able to express many ideas in the following poem, just by focussing on the object of plums:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet 

and so cold

The poet T.S Elliott said: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked" 


The 'thingy theory'  This is the theory of the importance of objects, and that around us, all objects carry great importance. They are not only physical bodies, in their different forms, with functions made of different materials... but they are connected to other scenarios, other times, other things of emotional experience.  We are unable to escape the fact that our memories and histories connect us all together through objects... and this way we are interdependent.  That cup, in the kitchen, in the external world, it belonged to my grandmother.... it has a great significance, and triggers an internal landscape.

Other relevant posts:

David: mythical and biblical ways that Michelangelo fought his own Goliath
Renaissance painting: How are we the stuff dreams are made of?
The Lady and the Unicorn: Six ways to find where your treasure lies