A great European painting has just been unveiled in Britain. It feels like forbidden fruit

For Brexiters, divorce from Europe’s cultural glories is just good riddance to foreign muck. Now we’re isolated, feasting on the art of Georges de la Tour feels like a subversive act against nationalism

A great masterpiece of European art has just gone on view at the National Gallery in London. Georges de la Tour’s painting The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (1630-34) has been loaned by the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas and can be seen, for free, in the French galleries.

Under normal circumstances I would be happy just to revel in this painting’s luminous beauty and cynical humour. De la Tour is a great master of light who loved to paint the Magdalene in darkness, her bare skin silvered by a pale candle flame. In The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs it’s the big, pale, brightly lit face of a woman in an elaborate headdress that catches our eye. She is a courtesan – hence the fancy dress – who is working with a servant and the boy showing us his hidden cards to cheat a foolish young man. I might have gone on to point out how a similar masterpiece by De la Tour, The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, hangs in the Louvre and how both paintings brilliantly reinterpret Caravaggio’s earlier work The Cardsharps.

Related: Brexit? Britain has already voted to stay. Just look in its galleries

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