Johann Erdmann Hummel

Around a chess table in the Palais Voss, a mansion on Berlin's Wilhelmstrasse, sit members of a chess club that met there in the years after Napoleon's defeat. Johann Erdmann Hummel painted The Chess Game in 1818 and 1819, and the players are real people, among them the archaeologist Aloys Hirt and the architect Hans Christian Genelli with his pipe. The version in the Alte Nationalgalerie probably served as a study for a picture of her Berlin friends ordered by Queen Wilhelmine of the Netherlands, a Prussian princess by birth.

Hummel came from Kassel and spent seven years in Rome in the 1790s before settling in Berlin. In 1809 he became professor of perspective, optics and architecture at the Prussian Academy of Arts, and Berliners called him Perspective Hummel. His pictures follow those rules closely, reflections included. In 1831 he painted the huge granite bowl in the Lustgarten, the park in front of Berlin's royal palace, its polished surface mirroring the people around it.