Fighting Card Players and Deathca. 1638

Jan Lievens(Leiden 1607 – 1674 Amsterdam)oil on canvas
67 x 84.9 cm
Signed and dated lower right: J. Lievens
JL-107

How To CiteWheelock, Arthur K. "Fighting Card Players and Death." In The Leiden Collection Catalogue. Edited byArthur K. Wheelock Jr. New York, 2017.
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Fighting Card Players and Death
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In 1635 Jan Lievens moved from London to Antwerp, perhaps

Comparative Figures

expecting that the arrival of the new governor-general of the Southern
Netherlands, the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, would usher in a period ofpeace and prosperity beneficial to the arts.[1] Lievens soon joined the local
painters’ guild and settled into a community of artists who specialized in
low-life genre scenes, landscapes, and still lifes, among them AdriaenBrouwer (1605/6–38), Jan Davide de Heem (1606–83/84), David Teniers
the Younger (1610–90), and Jan Cossiers (1600–71). In 1635, Brouwer
depicted these artists in a tavern scene, Smokers, in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art (fig 1).[2] The most inspirational of them for Lievens wasBrouwer, who apparently encouraged Lievens to depict, once again, roughpeasant types comparable to those he had portrayed in genre scenes atthe beginning of his career (fig 2).

Fig 1. Adriaen Brouwer, TheSmokers, ca. 1636, oil on panel,24.4 x 19.1 cm, New York, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Bequest of Michael Friedsam,
1931, 32.100.21

Brouwer’s impact on Lievens is particularly evident in two fascinating
genre paintings of peasants confronting death that he executed in 1638,
Fighting Card Players and Death in the Leiden Collection and Greedy
Couple Surprised by Death (fig 3). Lievens’s paintings, seemingly
pendants because they are comparable in size and visually andthematically related, capture the struggle for survival that Brouwer often
depicted in his genre images of rough-hewn peasants battling each otherin inns and taverns. The brawls that Brouwer depicted, however, are of adifferent order, for they do not feature, as did Lievens, Death in the guiseof an animated skeleton attacking his frightened adversaries.

Fig 2. Jan Lievens, Card Players,ca. 1625, oil on canvas, 97.5 x
105.4 cm, The Leiden Collection(JL-102)

In Fighting Card Players and Death , Death has fully engaged in the battle
for human survival transpiring between an enraged white-bearded card
player who brandishes a beer tankard and his knife-wielding opponent.
With a vine wreath wrapped around his skull, Death gleefully grabs thelatter’s red tunic and prepares to club him with a thigh bone. The bulging
eyes and pale complexion of the younger player as the card table falls onto
his lap, scattering the cards and the slate on which the score has beentallied, indicate that he is all too aware of his bleak fate. Through the open
doorway of this darkened interior, one sees a landscape with the setting

Fig 3. Jan Lievens, A Greedy
Couple Surprised by Death,
1638, oil on panel, 60 x 79 cm,Private Collection

sun, suggestive of the inevitability of death.[3] In Greedy Couple Surprisedby Death, the skeletal figure of Death interrupts an elderly couple in themidst of counting a hoard of money. As the old man tightly clasps their bagof coins, the old woman’s wide-eyed expression registers her shock at
Death’s unwelcome arrival as she desperately tries to push him away. The© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Fighting Card Players and Death
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clock behind them, however, warns that the moment of reckoning hascome. With a leering smile and head cocked at an angle, Death almost
seems to mock them, enjoying his ghoulish task.

Fig 4. Jan Lievens, Fighting Card
Players and Death, iii/iii, 1638,etching, 20.3 x 26.7 cm, The
Leiden Collection (JL-109)

Both these paintings draw their subjects from a well-establishediconographic tradition in Netherlandish art: death can come for anyone at
any time. This theme appears in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph ofDeath, ca. 1561 (Museo del Prado, Madrid), in which the skeletal deadrise en masse from their graves to snatch the living from the bustle of daily
activities. In addition, Peter Paul Rubens’s earliest known drawings arecopies after woodcuts from Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dance of Deathseries, published in 1562. Rubens copied all 49 scenes, which show
Death appearing to the unsuspecting in the midst of everyday life,
including a scene of a skeleton snatching coins from a miser’s table.[4]While themes related to life’s brevity and the elusiveness of worldly
possessions also occur in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish
painting, they primarily appear in portraits or vanitas still lifes containing
such motifs as an extinguished candle, hourglass, or skull. The jarring
appearance of an animated and predatory Death was far less common,and indicates the strong moralizing quality that Lievens sought to instill inthese works, a theme expressly evident in the inscription added below a
reproductive etching Lievens made of Fighting Card Players andDeath (fig 4). The inscription reads: “The ancient serpent hastens tospread quarrels and hatred, but death cancels all brawls.” [5]Lievens’s paintings Greedy Couple Surprised by Death and Fighting Card
Players and Death, as well as the print he made after the latter work, alldate to 1638. Lievens undoubtedly created these works in that year in
response to the devastating plague then ravaging the Netherlands, aplague that claimed the life of, among others, Adriaen Brouwer. The
realization that death could come at unexpected moments was one thatmust have weighed heavily on the populace, and Lievens, as well as otherDutch and Flemish artists, responded in imaginative and compelling ways
to this mortal reality.[6]© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Fighting Card Players and Death
Page 4 of 7-Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Fighting Card Players and Death
Page 5 of 7Endnotes
1. This text is derived from the entry written by Meredith Hale and Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. 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), 150–51, no. 35, 36.
2. For this painting, see Walter A. Liedtke, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art ,2 vols. (New York, 2007), 1:10.
3. Lievens seems to have been inspired by Adriaen Brouwer’s paintings of evening
landscapes. See, for example, Brouwer’s Moonlight Landscape, ca. 1635–37, oil on
panel, Staatliche Museum zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. This painting is illustrated in Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr.’s essay in Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered , ed. Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr. (Exh. cat. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee ArtMuseum; Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis) (New Haven, 2008), 152, fig. 2.
4. I. Q. van Regteren Altena, Peter Paul Rubens: Tekeningen naar Hans Holbeins
Dodendans, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1977), 2: pl. 37.
5. “Rixas atque odia salagit dispergere serpens / Antiquus, cuncta at iurgia morte cadunt.” The
English translation is taken from 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), 210, no. 78.
6. See, for example, Joos van Craesbeck (ca. 1605/6–ca. 1660), Brawl Outside an Inn, ca.
1638, oil on panel, 73 x 103 cm, Museum voor Schoone Kunsten, Antwerp, no. 850, whereDeath also intrudes in the brawl.

Provenance(Sale, Christie’s, London, 20 February 1920, no. 40, as by Arent de Gelder [to Goodew for£89.5]; [Galerie van Diemen & Co., Amsterdam, ca. 1920; H. M. Clark, London, ca.
1920–21]; sale, Lepke, Berlin, 27 October 1925, no. 62).
Dr. Fred. Schmidt-Benecke, Berlin, 1928; (sale, Wertheim, Berlin, 30 April 1930, no. 56; [Dr.
Albert Heppner, Berlin, 1931]).
Private collection, Germany; [Johnny van Haeften Ltd., London, 1999].
Private collection, The Netherlands, 1999–2009; [Johnny van Haeften Ltd., London, 2009].
From whom purchased by the present owner, 2009.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection

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Exhibition HistoryLondon, Johnny van Haeften Ltd., “Winter Exhibition of 17th-Century Dutch and Flemish Old
Master Paintings,” 1–23 December 1999.
Washington D.C., 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. 36 [lent by thepresent owner].

References
Schneider, Hans. “Lievens.” In Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike
bis zur Gegenwart. Edited by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker. 37 vols. Leipzig, 1907–50,23:214.
Schneider, Hans. Jan Lievens, sein Leben und seine Werke . Haarlem, 1932. Supplementedby Rudi E. O. Ekkart. Amsterdam, 1973, 126–27, no. 137, 328.
Klessmann, Rüdiger, ed. Jan Lievens: Ein Maler im Schatten Rembrandts . Exh. cat.
Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum. Brunswick, 1979, 104, under no. 34.
Ekkart, Rudi E. O. “Die streitenden Spieler und der Tod.” In Jan Lievens: Ein Maler imSchatten Rembrandts. Edited by Rüdiger Klessmann. Exh. cat. Brunswick, Herzog Anton
Ulrich-Museum. Brunswick, 1979, 207, under no. 111.
Sumowski, Werner. Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler. 6 vols. Landau and Pfalz, 1983–95,3:1783, no. 1198.
Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. “Jan Lievens: Bringing New Light to an Old Master.” In Jan
Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered. Edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Exh. cat.
Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam,Museum Het Rembrandthuis. New Haven, 2008, 15.
Dickey, Stephanie S. “The Raising of Lazarus” and “Fighting Cardplayers and Death.” In
Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered. Edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Exh. cat.
Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam,Museum Het Rembrandthuis. New Haven, 2008, 204, 210, under nos. 73 and 78.
Hale, Meredith and Wheelock Jr., Arthur K. “Fighting Cardplayers and Death.” In Jan
Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered.

Edited by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. Exh. cat.
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Fighting Card Players and Death
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Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam,Museum Het Rembrandthuis. New Haven, 2008, 150–51, no. 36.

Versions
Versions and Copies

1. After Jan Lievens, Fighting Cardplayers and Death, oil on canvas, 68 x 96 cm, location
unknown (sale, Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 22 March 2005, no. 7).

Versions NotesTechnical Summary
The painting was executed on a medium weight fabric that has been lined. The current stretcher
is slightly larger than the original composition and remnants of the tacking margins have been
opened up and adhered to the lining fabric on the front of the stretcher. The canvas wasprepared with a thin, light-colored ground that extends onto the tacking margin remnants.
Lievens applied the paint smoothly in opaque layers blended wet-into-wet. There is visible
brushwork and impasto in the figures and table in the foreground. Examination in infrared light at780 to 1000 mm and pentimenti show that Lievens originally painted a tree to the left of thewindow opening and this section of the wall was added later. The painting was not examinedwith x-radiography, but a diagonal line of brushwork through the proper right ear and brown hatof the seated man in the yellow vest does not relate to the current composition, and probablyindicates another artist’s change.
The painting appears to be in good condition. The paint has been abraded in a passage along
the upper left corner. Retouching is evident around the eyes of Death, as well as in his proper leftshoulder and humerus.

Technical Summary Endnotes© 2017 The Leiden Collection