(Leyden 1494–1533)
Card Players,
oil on panel, 35.5 x 48 cm, framed

The present painting is a variant based on a work in the collection of the Earl of Pembroke in Wilton House. The underdrawing clearly visible in the infrared photograph, which would not be present in a later copy and which requires the artist’s familiarity with the original, suggests that the composition was painted in the workshop. The colour pigments used correspond to a period of execution around 1520.

Professor Lawton Smith considers the painting in Wilton to be the original of the present composition and included it as such in her catalogue raisonné. However, certain questions arise with regard to the dating and the chronology within the artist’s oeuvre. Both here and in the Wilton painting, the game is set in an interior and is watched by spectators, as is Leyden’s composition of The Chess Players in Berlin. It brings to mind the moralising subjects by Quentin Massys and the allegories of greed and avarice in the oeuvre of Marinus van Reymerswaele, whose criticism of gambling is even harsher. Warnings of extravagance, avarice and cruelty are accompanied by allusions to the vice of unchasteness. An amorous aspect is suggested by such motifs as the physical contact and eye contact included.

A technological analysis of this picture carried out by Professor Manfred Schreiner, head of the Institute of Colour Theory at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, is available. Its findings confirm that the painting dates from the first half of the 16th century. With the aid of infrared photography, Professor Schreiner has also succeeded in identifying underdrawing typical of the period. Moreover, the oak panel’s margins, originally unpainted, were overpainted at a later period.