Cheating at Cards, Jan Miense Molenaer, c. 1650 - 1668Jan Miense Molenaer · 1668

After the mid-1640s Jan Miense Molenaer began to focus increasingly on compositions with merrymaking peasants that were heavily influenced by Adriaen Brouwer and Isack and Adriaen van Ostade.10 As in the Rijksmuseum Cheating at Cards, the palette in these works is largely tonal and the small-scale figures are set in large barn-like spaces. These interiors most resemble those in paintings by Adriaen van Ostade from the first half of the 1640s,11 while the man passed out on a barrel is probably derived from Brouwer’s Slaughter Feast in Schwerin,12 and the gnarly drunk seen in profile wearing a red scarf on his head resembles other figures by that Flemish artist.13 With the exception of a few highly animated and quite colourful pictures teeming with more meticulously rendered figures from around 1659-62, the quality of Molenaer’s later production is mediocre, as evidenced by the present panel.14 The lack of dated paintings and the repetition of motifs, such as the man slumped over a barrel,15 makes it difficult to establish a chronology for Molenaer’s work in the latter part of his career, and a more specific indication than the 1650s or 1660s for this scene cannot be given. The subject, card playing, was already popular with artists in the Middle Ages, and in the 1520s was depicted by Lucas van Leyden and his followers.16 The Utrecht Caravaggisti were the first seventeenth-century Dutch painters to employ it. Molenaer treated the theme in one of his earliest known works, Card Players by Lamplight of around 1627-28,17 and it would remain a favourite throughout his career. In the Rijksmuseum painting, as in his earliest one of card players and another work of around 1634-35,18 an old peasant is being cheated out of his money by a figure holding a mirror behind him, revealing his cards to his opponent. This motif had already been used in the northern Netherlands by Dirck van Baburen.19 As in Molenaer’s early output as well, a figure (or figures in the case of the present one) looks out of the picture and encourages the viewer’s complicity in the swindle. The young woman is also showing us the five cards in her hand, which includes a high one, the ace of clubs.20 Whereas the old peasant’s opponents in Molenaer’s earliest treatments of the subject are dandified soldiers, here he is being cheated by members of his own social and economic class. In keeping with the low status of the company and the humble space they occupy the score is being marked with chalk directly on the table, rather than on a slate, as in a more gentrified interior with card players by Jan Steen, for example.21 As in Steen’s painting, though, the chalk in Molenaer’s was probably also intended as an allusion to the Dutch sayings ‘in het krijt staan’ (literally ‘to be in the chalk’: to be in the red) and ‘met dubbel krijt schrijven’ (literally ‘to write with a double chalk’: to charge double).22 Card playing had a bad reputation in the seventeenth century and was attacked by moralists and discouraged by the civic authorities.23 Among the vices with which the pastime was related are excessive drinking and idleness. Molenaer also made these associations in the present painting. Two of his peasants are holding glasses, which one of them appears about to replenish from a rather large jug. Idleness is embodied in the slouched figure in the left foreground and the man behind him who has fallen asleep on a barrel. Jonathan Bikker, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements