A Game of Cards

The museum dates the picture to about 1660 and sets it in the long Netherlandish tradition of card-players and smokers in taverns, a genre whose amorous meaning was carried by ordinary objects — the museum reads the foot-warmer as the lover who subjects himself to a woman’s will. The picture is painted on an oak panel and measures 65 × 58 cm; the museum keeps it in a frame of 76 × 66 × 5 cm.

Gabriël Metsu (1629–1667) was born in Leiden, the son of a painter, and was enrolled in the city’s Guild of St Luke by 1648, working in the fine and highly finished manner he learned from Gerrit Dou. He moved to Amsterdam in 1657, and in his last decade his interiors, still lifes and portraits answered the work of Gerard ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer while remaining recognisably his own. He died in Amsterdam in 1667, aged thirty-eight. The work is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.