Top 11 Paintings of Magicians and Tricksters

Street conjurers, card cheats and quack doctors sit next to surrealist sorcerers. Half of them want your attention, the other half want your purse.

1. 1
   The Cardsharps

   Caravaggio's two cheats fleecing a naive young card player.
   1000pts

   BE
2. 2
   The Fortune Teller (La Tour)

   Georges de La Tour's old fortune teller distracts a youth while her companions rob him.
   839pts
3. 3
   The Fortune Teller (Caravaggio)

   Caravaggio's gypsy girl reads a young man's palm and slips the ring off his finger.
   732pts
4. 4
   The Conjurer

   Bosch-school panel of a street magician doing cups and balls while an accomplice steals a purse.
   599pts
5. 5
   The Juggler (The Magician)

   Remedios Varo's 1956 painting of a magician with a pentagram face performing from a carnival cart.
   599pts
6. 6
   The Conjuror (Hone)

   Nathaniel Hone's 1775 satire of Joshua Reynolds as an old magician conjuring paintings out of Old Master prints.
   0pts
7. 7
   The Extraction of the Stone of Madness

   Bosch's quack surgeon in a funnel hat cuts a stone of folly out of a patient's head.
   0pts
8. 8
   Saint James and the Magician Hermogenes

   Bruegel's 1564 design of a magician's den full of witches, demons and flying brooms.
   0pts
9. 9
   Prestidigitator

   Paul Klee's 1927 conjuring trick in thin lines, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
   0pts
10. 10
    The Quack

    Gerrit Dou's 1652 crowd around a medicine seller in Leiden, with the painter himself watching from a window.
    0pts
11. 11
    The Magician (tarot card)

    Pamela Colman Smith's 1909 card for the Rider–Waite tarot, a magician with the tools of all four suits on his table.
    0pts

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