Title - The Fortune Teller

Artist - Sir Alfred James Munnings

The setting of The Fortune Teller may be one of the country race meetings, such as St Buryan, which Munnings frequented while living at the artists' colony at Lamorna in Cornwall between 1911 and 1914. Although he had painted gypsies in East Anglia it was the gypsy hop-pickers he encountered on visits from Cornwall to Hampshire who really fired his imagination. 'Never in my life have I been so filled with a desire to work as I was then'. The women, who would often produce wonderful hats to be painted in, made particularly good subjects. 'Nobody could beat their style of dress, with black silk apron over a full-pleated skirt, a pink or mauve blouse showing off a tough, lithe figure; strings of red beads, and wonderful earrings glinting under blue-black hair.