The Card Players, Andries Both, c. 1630 - c. 1635 – (Andries Both) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Andries Both

Date: 1635

Size: 32 x 43 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

This painting of a group of people by a shed combines two events which seem to be taking place independently of each other. The three men playing cards around a makeshift table are so absorbed in their game that they are paying no attention to the other three figures on the left. Both scenes are admonitions against immoral behaviour, for the woman is being fondled by the man beside her while she is holding an egg that she has taken from the seller’s basket. Card-playing had been regarded as morally corrupting since the beginning of the fifteenth century. Games of chance were equated with idleness, avarice, discord, deceit and indecency.5 The message broadcast by the woman being seduced here is abundantly clear. In addition, a basket of eggs had symbolized the suggestive erotic meaning of the egg since the sixteenth century. It stands for both virility and fertility, and is therefore associated with infidelity and adultery in this kind of context.6 The caricatural and farcical types that Andries Both painted here are very reminiscent of the work of Adriaen Brouwer, who hailed from Antwerp and was briefly active in Haarlem, and Adriaen van Ostade, who was born in Haarlem. There are compositional similarities between the Rijksmuseum picture and the Peasant Concert in a private collection in England.7 It too shows a group of men by a shed with a view through the trees on the left. One wonders, though, whether this really is an imaginary evocation of the French countryside as Waddingham suggested.8 The similarities in the style of the figures to those in a tavern scene dated 1634 in Utrecht are so great that the two paintings can be dated to roughly the same period.9 Richard Harmanni, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements