Card Games and Gamblers in Painting: 12 Famous Works
The most famous card game paintings include Cezanne’s Card Players, Caravaggio’s Cardsharps and, yes, Dogs Playing Poker. Twelve tables where someone is winning, someone is cheating, and one hand of cards sold for over 250 million dollars.
What is on the table
One card game here is the most expensive genre scene ever sold.
Three of the twelve show a cheat mid move, aces behind belts and backs.
One was painted to sell cigars, and outlived every painting that mocked it.
One table seats the war wounded of 1920, playing with prosthetic hands.
And the oldest game on this list is chess, played by three sisters in 1555.
1 | The Card Players, Paul Cezanne (about 1893)
Two men, a bottle, a table: the calmest card game ever painted. Cezanne painted five versions, using farmhands from his family estate as models.
In 2011 the royal family of Qatar bought one version for a reported 250 million dollars or more, then a record for any painting. Whether he deserves the crown is the question of Is Cezanne the greatest painter of all time.
2 | The Cardsharps, Caravaggio (about 1595)
An innocent boy studies his cards while one crook signals over his shoulder and another pulls a hidden five from his belt. You are the only honest witness at the table.
The painting launched Caravaggio: a cardinal bought it and gave him lodging, patronage and protection. The rest of that dangerous life is in my guide to Caravaggio.
3 | The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, Georges de La Tour (about 1636)
A rich young fool, a courtesan, a maid with wine, and a cheat calmly showing us the ace tucked behind his back. Nobody at the table looks at anybody directly.
La Tour painted the same con twice, once with clubs, once with diamonds. The master of candlelight and card tables is in my guide to Georges de La Tour.
4 | The Card Players, Lucas van Leyden (about 1520)
One of the earliest card game paintings in Europe, made when playing cards themselves were barely a century old there.
The players wear the faces of courtiers, and some historians read the game as political negotiation in disguise: cards as diplomacy.
5 | The Chess Game, Sofonisba Anguissola (1555)
Three sisters play chess under the eye of a servant, and the youngest grins straight at us. The painter was their sister, about 23 years old.
Giorgio Vasari saw it and wrote that the figures lacked only speech. The first celebrated woman painter of Europe is in my guide to Sofonisba Anguissola.
6 | Argument over a Card Game, Jan Steen (about 1665)
The game has ended in a drawn knife and a thrown jug, with a dog barking and cards scattered in the dirt. Steen ran a tavern and knew the choreography.
As always he hides the moral in plain sight: the trampled cards were a warning to every gambler in the room. The comedian of Dutch art is in my guide to Jan Steen.
7 | At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo, Edvard Munch (1892)
Bent heads circle the green felt like moths around a lamp. Munch visited the casino at Monte Carlo and became fascinated by the players’ trances.
He wrote about the gambling fever in his notes and painted the table as an altar. The man who painted every obsession is in my guide to Edvard Munch.
8 | A Friend in Need, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge (1903)
Dogs playing poker, one passing an ace under the table with a hind paw. Painted for a cigar company as one of a series of 16.
Critics used it for a century as shorthand for bad taste. In 2015 two of the series sold for 658,000 dollars, and everyone knows it. Almost nobody can name the painter.
9 | The Skat Players, Otto Dix (1920)
Three German veterans play cards with what the war left them: jaw plates, glass eyes, prosthetic arms. One holds his cards with his foot.
Dix, a machine gunner in the trenches, painted the game as a portrait of a country pretending to be whole. It hangs in Berlin.
10 | The Card Players, Theodoor Rombouts (about 1620)
A Flemish follower of Caravaggio sets a whole table of soldiers and sharpers under tavern light, cards fanned, coins stacked, tension rising.
Rombouts made the card table his specialty, exporting the Italian con game to Antwerp taverns.
11 | The Gamblers, Hendrick ter Brugghen (1623)
Two men argue over dice and coins, half in shadow, painted by the best of the Utrecht painters who brought Caravaggio’s lighting north.
Dice were the poor man’s cards, and moralists hated them even more. The painting sits in Minneapolis.
12 | The Fortune Teller, Caravaggio (about 1595)
Not a card game, the older con: a gypsy fortune teller reads a young dandy’s palm and slips off his ring while he stares into her eyes.
Caravaggio reportedly pulled the woman off the street to pose, refusing to copy antique statues. Games, cons and street life were his school.
Cards on canvas, quick answers
What is the most famous card game painting? Cezanne’s Card Players, followed by Caravaggio’s Cardsharps and Coolidge’s poker dogs.
How much did The Card Players sell for? The Qatari purchase in 2011 was reported at 250 million dollars or more, a record at the time.
Is Dogs Playing Poker one painting? No, a series of 16 commissioned in 1903 to advertise cigars. A Friend in Need is the famous one.
Why did old masters paint cheats so often? Gambling scenes sold as moral warnings, which conveniently let buyers hang a tavern scene in a respectable house.
Where can I see these paintings? The Cardsharps in Fort Worth, the Cheat in the Louvre, a Card Players version at the Met and another in the Courtauld.
One closing fact: when Cezanne painted his farmhands, he paid them to sit still for hours. The gardener Paulet, the man with the pipe, is now worth more per painted centimeter than any card player who ever lived.