Moorland fire

Whilst returning from my daily walk, I noticed that a large fire had started on the hillside above the town, about 3 miles from our house. Lots of sirens blaring as the Fire Service go to tackle the blaze.

Similarly noisy was today's first listen - the Miles Davis album You're Under Arrest (1985) - favourite track Katia.

More music in today's painting - The Musicians' Quarrel by Georges de la Tour (c1620/1630.)  The painting was unknown as such until it was discovered in Wales in the 1950s, when it was wrongly thought to be by Caravaggio. 

The scene is two musicians fighting, watched by two others, who seem amused and by a woman who looks horrified. It appears that the musician on the left, carrying a shawm and a hurdy gurdy may have been pretending to be blind - to attract sympathy - and that his assailant is clutching a lemon, trying to squirt it into his eyes to prove the fraud.

In the early seventeenth century, artists like La Tour began painting fairly large canvasses of poor people.  Some may have had a cautionary tale attached but it is thought this one did not.  It was simply an expression of the artist's skill at a time when the Counter-Reformation in France prompted a movement that showed sympathy and charity for beggars and other poor itinerants, such as street musicians.