Die Schachspieler

This little panel is really a portrait of the men who taught Eakins. Two of them bend over a chessboard, an elderly French teacher on the left, a painter who was probably Eakins's first art instructor on the right. Standing between them, watching the game, is the artist's own father, Benjamin. Eakins even signed it as a gift to him, painting a Latin line onto the drawer of the chess table that reads, roughly, Benjamin Eakins's son made this in '76. There is a fourth teacher in the room too. A print of Gérôme, the master Eakins had studied under in Paris, hangs on the wall above the clock. He painted it in 1876, the year the young United States marked its first hundred years. Five years on it became the first work the Metropolitan Museum ever accepted as a gift from a living artist.