An elderly man with hunched shoulders turns his head as if listening to the woman in the adjacent painting, hands at her hips, lips parted. Though they seem to be people of modest means, the man’s striped pants and the woman’s silk apron are likely actors’ costumes. The couple may represent stock characters—a submissive husband, a scolding wife—from contemporary street theater. Seventeenth-century audiences viewed such characters as comic. The dirty fingernails and careworn faces of Georges de La Tour’s figures suggest that he painted them from live models, but did he intend them as broad caricatures or sympathetic portrayals of old age?
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