Party of Armenians Playing Cards

A single large candle lights this room, and around it men and women are playing cards into the evening. Nobody is very formal. In the foreground one of the men seems more interested in the woman beside him than in the game, while in the corner at the left an old woman carries on with her spinning.

The Rijksmuseum identifies the men as Armenians by their clothes, above all the fur-trimmed coats Armenian men typically wore, and Vanmour painted those details with care. Armenians were a large community in Istanbul, and many of its families lived by trade. Armenian merchants carried a good share of the Persian silk that reached Ottoman ports such as Smyrna, where Dutch traders bought it for Europe.