Card Players
Jan Lievens(Leiden 1607 – 1674 Amsterdam)ca. 1625
oil on canvas
97.5 x 105.4 cm
signed with initials in dark paint, upper left: “I.L.”
JL-102© 2024 The Leiden Collection

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How to cite
DeWitt, Lloyd and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. “Card Players” (2017). In The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 3rd ed. Edited byArthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Lara Yeager-Crasselt. New York, 2020–23. https://www.theleidencollection.com/archive/(archived December 2023).
A PDF of every version of this entry is available in this Online Catalogue's Archive, and the Archive is managed by apermanent URL. New versions are added only when a substantive change to the narrative occurs.

To judge from the chalk marks on the back wall, each indicating a drink ordered

Comparative Figuresfrom the innkeeper, it has been a long night of gambling and, to the intent pleasure of
the kibitzers crowding the table, the stakes and tensions have clearly risen with every
card the two soldiers have played.[1] Jan Lievens’s painting, however, is not so muchabout the game itself as about the expressions on the protagonists’ faces at that
dramatic moment when one of the players must deal with the sudden realization that
he has lost. Holding his five of hearts loosely in his hand, the vanquished gambler
stares in disbelief at the ace of hearts triumphantly held aloft by his helmetedopponent. Even if it were not for the obvious juxtaposition of the winning and losing

Fig 1. Workshop of Gerrit vanHonthorst, The Card Players, 1624, oilon canvas, 125 x 190 cm,Gemäldegalerie, Wiesbaden, M 409

cards or the intent gazes of this companions as they measure his reaction, the soldier’s
body language and downward expression would be enough to tell the story.
This dramatic painting from the beginning of Lievens’s career demonstrates how
thoroughly the young Leiden artist internalized the thematic and compositionalinnovations of the Utrecht Caravaggisti from the early 1620s. When Gerrit van
Honthorst (1592–1656) returned to Utrecht in 1620, he brought with him an artistic
repertoire that featured depictions of card and backgammon players huddled around a[2]table.

Honthorst’s compositions were tightly cropped, with the viewer inevitably

situated close to the action, peering into the game over the shoulder of one of theFig 2. Dirck van Baburen, The
Mocking of Christ, ca. 1622, oil oncanvas, 106 x 136 cm, Museum
Catharijnconvent, Utrecht

players. Gambling is a night sport, where passions and foolish behavior are allowed
their full range, their limits decided only by the size of the gamblers’ purses. In his
now-lost Card Cheats, known today only from a workshop replica (fig 1), Honthorst
exploited the darkness of the surroundings to unite the action, as light from a lanternin the middle of the table brightly illuminates the faces of the players and theircohorts, including that of the silhouetted gambler whose arm hides the light source.
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Not surprisingly, prior to the discovery of the monogram IL, Lievens’s painting wasattributed to Honthorst.[3] The close compositional similarities to Honthorst’s
gambling paintings, however, also reveal significant differences in Lievens’s figure
types and body language, not to mention brushwork, that help distinguish the work of
the two artists. Lievens’s gamblers are a coarser, lower-class group than Honthorst’scard cheats. They sit in an extremely tight circle, their forms more tightly compressed
and restrained than those in Honthorst’s painting, with the result that the figures’facial expressions rather than their gestures become the painting’s focus. Lievens’s
bold brushwork, rough and unmodulated, and totally in keeping with the character ofFig 3. Jan Lievens, Tric Trac Players,ca. 1623, oil on canvas, 100 x 105 cm,
Spier Collection, London

the players seated at the table, also differs from Honthorst’s smooth and elegantmanner of painting. Finally, as is characteristic of other early genre scenes by theartist, Lievens seems to offer no moral judgment on the action of the card players.
Whereas Honthorst followed a long iconographic tradition by emphasizing thedeceitfulness and moral corruption of the game, Lievens departs entirely from such anarrative. His gamblers are involved in a game of chance, and the challenge he set forhimself was to capture the emotions at the moment of truth.
Honthorst was not the only artist among the Utrecht Caravaggisti who tightly cropped
his compositions in the early 1620s, so also did Dirck van Baburen (ca. 1595–1624),
as seen in The Mocking of Christ from ca. 1622 (fig 2). Lievens must have known
Van Baburen’s painting, for he based the figure of the silhouetted card player on thehelmeted soldier in the latter’s work. Lievens probably also responded to theFig 4. Jan Lievens, An Old Man
Holding a Skull, ca. 1630, oil on panel,
61.6 x 48.3 cm, private collection

aggressive chiaroscuro effects in Van Baburen’s paintings and the rugged physicalityof his figures.
Lievens may have painted Card Players as a pendant to another gambling scene, Tric
Trac Players (fig 3), for the two works have virtually the same dimensions, a similar
compositional focus, are both painted on canvas, and date from the early to
mid-1620s.[4] Nevertheless, as Bernhard Schnackenburg has noted, Card Players is
compositionally more sophisticated than is Tric Trac Players and is painted in a far
bolder, more assured technique.[5] These stylistic differences, which suggest that thetwo works were painted sequentially, demonstrate how rapidly Lievens matured as anartist during these years.
Lievens’s Card Players belongs to a genre of guardroom and tavern scenes of soldiersthat only developed in the 1620s. In an era racked by conflict, the presence of soldiersin the Netherlands was nearly constant, especially after the resumption of hostilities
with Spain upon the termination of the Twelve-Year Truce in 1621. These men weremainly foreign mercenaries whose daily lives swung between periods of violence andboredom. Many lived an unanchored existence, a great deal of it passed in thedemimonde of taverns and low company. Dutch genre paintings often concerned© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Card Players
Page 4 of 9themselves with moral boundaries, and because scenes of soldiers often included
depictions of gambling, indolence, prostitution, drunkenness, and other activities thattransgressed these limits, they were very effective in holding the public’s interest.[6]Lievens did not paint real soldiers or depict an actual situation, but rather dressed up
local models to take on roles in this small human drama. For example, the man at theright also appears in Tric Trac Players (fig 3) and in Lievens’s An Old Man Holding aSkull, ca. 1630 (fig 4). Jan Jansz. Orlers, the Leiden burgomaster, historian, and art
lover who wrote about Lievens in his 1641 history of Leiden, owned this latter
painting.[7] In the 1640 inventory of his possessions the painting is described as “thekeeper of the Almshouse with a Skull in his hand.”[8] Two archival documents revealthat in 1629 and 1631 the financial officer (rentmeester) of the Sint Catharina
Gasthuys in Leiden was named Jan van Heussen, who resided in the Rijn district oftown, where both Lievens and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69) lived.[9] This model
also sat for other Leiden artists, among them an anonymous artist who painted Elderly
Man in the Leiden Collection (GD-109), and Rembrandt, in his Old Man in a Fur Cap(Tiroler Landesmuseum, Innsbruck).[10]Young painters also used fellow artists and friends as models to save the expense ofhiring professionals. The young man with the pipe in the center of Card Players is
likely Rembrandt, who posed for Lievens a number of times, as in a portrait of ca.
1629 (private collection, on loan to Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).[11] Lievens, in turn,appeared in several of Rembrandt’s early works, as in Three Musicians (Allegory ofHearing), ca. 1624, in the Leiden Collection (RR-105). Rembrandt and Lievens
would develop an artistic friendship and rivalry in which they forged a radically newstyle whose realism and drama are already evident in this work.

- Lloyd DeWitt and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., 2017

© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Card Players
Page 5 of 9Endnotes
1. This entry is based, in large part, on the one that appears in Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., ed., Jan Lievens: A
Dutch Master Rediscovered (Exh. cat. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee
Art Museum; Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis) (New Haven, 2008), 86–87, no. 3.
2. Richard J. Judson and Rudolf E. O. Ekkart, Gerrit van Honthorst, 1592–1656 (Doornspijk, 1999),
17–19.
3. On the reverse of the painting is a label with the name “Van Honthorst.” The first art historians torecognize the correct attribution were B. J. A. Renckens and R. E. O. Ekkart in 1976 (letter to the thenowner). See Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., ed., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (Exh. cat.
Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam, Museum
Het Rembrandthuis) (New Haven, 2008), 289 n. 2.
4. John Twilley, “Interim Thread Count Report” (2009) of The Card Players Study Day, The Leiden
Collection, New York, July 9, 2010, notes that the canvas in Card Players has a more regular weave thandoes that of Tric Trac Players.
5. Bernhard Schnackenburg, in the entry on the painting in the auction catalogue (Sotheby’s, Amsterdam,May 8, 2007, lot 77).
6. Jochai Rosen, Soldiers at Leisure: The Guardroom Scene in Dutch Genre Painting of the Golden Age(Amsterdam, 2010), 78, n. 15.
7. For Orlers and Lievens, see Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. in Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (Exh.
cat. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam,Museum Het Rembrandthuis) (New Haven, 2008), 5.
8. “De Coster van het Gasthuys met een Dootshooft inden arm.” See: Rudolf E. O. Ekkart and Maarten L.
Wurfbain, eds., Geschildert tot Leyden anno 1626 (exh. cat., Leiden, Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal)(Leiden, 1976), 18; Meredith Hale in Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, ed. Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr. (Exh. cat. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art
Museum; Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis) (New Haven, 2008), 124, 290 nn. 7 and 8. See alsosale catalogue, Christies, London, 6 December 2007, lot 7446.
9. For Van Heussen as rentmeester, see the inventory of the Sint Catharinagasthuys, Regionaal Archief
Leiden, Gasthuizen, arch. 504, inv. I.1.3.26 and 27. For further information on Van Heussen, seeHenriette Rahusen’s entry on Leiden School, Elderly Man (GD-109).
10. See Meredith Hale in Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, ed. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (Exh. cat.
Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam, Museum
Het Rembrandthuis) (New Haven, 2008), 290 n. 7.
11. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., ed., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (Exh. cat. Washington D.C.,© 2024 The Leiden Collection

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National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam, Museum HetRembrandthuis) (New Haven, 2008), 114–15, no. 17, ill.

ProvenanceOvide Ghislain (died 1944), Jemappes, Belgium, by 1927; by descent to his grandchild, Belgium (sale,Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 8 May 2007, no. 77 [to Johnny van Haeften, Ltd., London]). [1]From whom acquired by the present owner in 2007.

Provenance Notes

1. Card Players was in Ghislain’s collection when it was first recorded in a certificate dated 3 October
1927. In that certificate, René Tonus of Brussels authenticated the painting as by Gerrit van Honthorst;
Lievens’s initials were by then covered with dirt and old varnish. Ghislain was killed by Nazi forces in
1944, but the painting was retained by his surviving family. In 1976, B. J. A. Renckens of the RKD andR. E. O. Ekkart correctly identified the work as by Lievens, after correspondence with Ghislain’sdescendant.

Exhibition History
Washington, National Gallery of Art, “Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered,” 26 October
2008–11 January 2009; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum, 7 February–26 April 2009; Amsterdam,Museum Het Rembrandthuis, 17 May–9 August 2009, no. 3 [lent by the present owner].
Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, August 2011–November 2016 [lent by the present owner].
Paris, Museé du Louvre, “Masterpieces of The Leiden Collection: The Age of Rembrandt,” 22February–22 May 2017 [lent by the present owner].
Beijing, National Museum of China, “Rembrandt and His Time: Masterpieces of The Leiden
Collection,” 17 June–3 September 2017 [lent by the present owner].
Shanghai, Long Museum, West Bund, “Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals in the Dutch Golden Age:Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection,” 23 September 2017–25 February 2018 [lent by the presentowner].
Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, “The Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer: Masterpiecesof The Leiden Collection,” 28 March 2018–22 July 2018 [lent by the present owner].
St. Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum, “The Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer: Masterpieces ofThe Leiden Collection,” 5 September 2018–13 January 2019 [lent by the present owner].
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Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, “Rembrandt, Vermeer and the Dutch Golden Age. Masterpieces fromThe Leiden Collection and the Musée du Louvre,” 14 February–18 May 2019 [lent by the presentowner].

References
Schnackenburg, Bernhard. “Jan Lievens und Pieter de Grebber.” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 68 (2007):
194–99, figs. 13, 14, 15; 216 n. 57.
Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. “Jan Lievens: Bringing New Light to an Old Master.” In Jan Lievens: A DutchMaster Rediscovered. Edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., 8, 11, 86–87, no. 3. Exh. cat., Washington,D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam, Museum Het
Rembrandthuis. New Haven, 2008.
Coutré, Jacquelyn N. “Vanquishing the Shadow: Jan Lievens Comes to Light after 250 Years.” Dutch
Crossing 33 (October 2009): 135–51, no. 1.
Schnackenburg, Bernhard. Jan Lievens: Friend and Rival of the Young Rembrandt. Petersberg, 2016, 42,47, 180, no. 17.
Surh, Dominique.

“Card Players.” In Masterpieces of The Leiden Collection: The Age ofRembramdt. Edited by Blaise Ducos and Dominique Surh, 74, no. 27. Exh. cat. Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Paris, 2017.
Yeager-Crasselt, Lara. “Rembrandt and His Time: China and the Dutch Republic in the Golden Age.” In
Rembrandt and His Time: Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection. Edited by Lara Yeager-Crasselt, 10;14, no. 7. Translated by Li Ying. Exh. cat. Beijing, National Museum of China. Beijing, 2017
Yeager-Crasselt, Lara. “Card Players.” In Rembrandt and His Time: Masterpieces from The Leiden
Collection. Edited by Lara Yeager-Crasselt, 34–35; 173, no. 7. Translated by Li Ying. Exh. cat. Beijing,
National Museum of China. Beijing, 2017.
Long Museum, West Bund. Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals in the Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces fromThe Leiden Collection. Exh. cat. Shanghai, Long Museum, West Bund. Shanghai, 2017, 56.
Yeager-Crasselt, Lara. “The Leiden Collection and the Dutch Golden Age.” In The Age of Rembrandt
and Vermeer: Masterpieces of The Leiden Collection. Edited by Polina Lyubimova, 21; 31. Translated byDaria Babich and Daria Kuzina. Exh. cat. Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts; St.
Petersburg, The State Hermitage Museum. Moscow, 2018.
Yeager-Crasselt, Lara. “Card Players.” In The Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer: Masterpieces of TheLeiden Collection. Edited by Polina Lyubimova, 106–7; 235, no. 20. Translated by Daria Babich andDaria Kuzina. Exh. cat. Moscow, The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts; St. Petersburg, The State
Hermitage Museum. Moscow, 2018.
Yeager-Crasselt, Lara. “The Leiden Collection and the Dutch Golden Age.” In Rembrandt, Vermeer and© 2024 The Leiden Collection

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Page 8 of 9the Dutch Golden Age. Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection and the Musée du Louvre. Edited byBlaise Ducos and Lara Yeager-Crasselt, 28. Exh. cat. Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi. London, 2019.
[Exhibition catalogue also published in French and Arabic.]
Ducos, Blaise, and Lara Yeager-Crasselt, eds. Rembrandt, Vermeer and the Dutch Golden Age.
Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection and the Musée du Louvre. Exh. cat. Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu
Dhabi. London, 2019, 54, 72–3, no. 13. [Exhibition catalogue also published in French and Arabic.]

Technical Summary
The support is composed of two pieces of medium-weight, plain-weave fabric with a lined horizontal joinnear the center of the composition, just below the chins of all four figures.[1] All four tacking margins havebeen removed, and there is cusping along all but the right edge. In 2009 the Thread Count Automation
Project (TCAP) confirmed the support has been cut down along the right edge and that the support’s regularweave pattern indicates it belongs to the category known as the “Vermeerian” type.[2] Repetitive horizontal
creases suggest the support may have been previously rolled. There are no wax seals, canvas stamps,
inscriptions, or labels along the lining or stretcher reverse.
A double ground, composed of an orange-brown lower layer lacking lead white followed by a gray-green
ground composed of earth pigments with some lead white, has been applied.
The paint has been applied in a confident manner with broad, bold strokes. The surface of the painting has anoverall smooth appearance with textured highlights, deliberately executed with impasto and well-definedbrushwork.
The profile of the soldier whose back is turned to the viewer was executed after the central figure, who may
depict Rembrandt, as the central figure’s flesh tones are visible beneath the red brown tones of the soldier’sface.
No underdrawing is readily apparent in infrared images captured at 900–1700 nanometers. The images reveal
minor compositional changes to the contour of the soldier’s proper left shoulder, which has been extendedslightly with a lighter brown paint and lies on top of the chin of the adjacent figure on the left.
The painting has been signed with initials in dark paint along the upper left but is undated.
The painting was cleaned, lined, and restored in 2007 and remains in a good state of preservation.[3]Technical Summary Endnotes

1. According to Devi Ormond’s 2013 examination report, it is unclear whether this is a seam or a tear.
2. TCAP codirectors: C. Richard Johnson Jr. of Cornell University and Don H. Johnson of Rice
University.
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3. Entry based on 2013 examination report by Devi Ormond, Associate Paintings Conservator, J. Paul
Getty Museum.

© 2024 The Leiden Collection