Children gambling around a table,
oil on canvas, 95.5 x 136 cm, framed

The present painting belongs to a group of works depicting figures playing games, a favoured subject during the first half of the seventeenth century. This genre of painting became popular in the wake of innovative compositions such as Caravaggio’s Cardsharps (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, inv. no. AP 1987.06) or the paintings of Bartolomeo Manfredi, whose works also popularised this theme (see for example the Soldiers playing cards, Uffizi, Florence, inv. no. 6609). From the beginning of the second decade of the seventeenth century this genre gained great popularity.

These works are also rooted in an older pictorial tradition, however, largely derived from Northern Europe, which thanks to the broad distribution of printed material, saw this kind of iconographic theme spread throughout the continent (see G. Berra, Le incisioni raffiguranti giocatori di carte o di backgammon e i Bari di Caravaggio, in: Il giuoco al tempo di Caravaggio, exhibition catalogue, ed. by. P. Carofano, Pontedera 2013, pp. 19-45).

Before the introduction of Caravaggio’s depictions of the subject, the theme of card players had only a moral connotation, as a warning against vice. From the Middle Ages, the church had condemned games of chance, and especially those involving risk and luck, owing to the dangers they generated for squandering money. During the seventeenth century however, the representation of games, as illustrated by the present painting, no longer serves as an admonition, but rather as a description of daily life as well as a representation of a dynamic exchange, particularly between the social classes (see op.cit. Carofano, 2013, p. 13).