A Card Game in a Tavern

Jan Steen liked to hide a second story inside a scene, and the Museum of Fine Arts reads this one as a swindle. A well-dressed young woman is playing cards with a soldier, and she turns to show us her hand, the ace of clubs and the ace of hearts. The game is rigged. One man leans in to fill the soldier's glass yet again, and another, standing by the fireplace, has a good view of the soldier's cards. Through the doorway at the back a couple can be seen in another room, a hint that this house is a brothel. A sword leans against a chair in the foreground, and a dog sleeps on the floor.

Steen painted the panel around 1660. In 1995 Sotheby's bought the whole collection of the Amsterdam collector Joost Ritman, and this was one of the 18 best Dutch pictures it sold on with the dealer Robert Noortman. In 2011 Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo, collectors living in Massachusetts, bought it in London, and in 2021 they gave it to the museum for its Center for Netherlandish Art.