The House of Cards

A young man in a brown coat builds a fragile house of cards on a green-topped table, his whole body bent in concentration as he steadies the next card between his fingers. Jean-Siméon Chardin painted this quiet genre scene probably in 1737, one of several versions of a subject that became his best-known image of absorbed childhood; the soft, granular paint surface and the tender fall of light give the small drama its celebrated stillness. The picture was in the collection of Catherine the Great before joining the Andrew W. Mellon Collection in Washington. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.