Still Life with Chessboard

In 1934 the Orangerie in Paris opened an exhibition called Painters of Reality, which brought half-forgotten 17th-century French painters back into view. This still life was number one in its catalogue, five years after it had been sold in Berlin with the collection of a German industrialist, and a Dutch collector, Pieter Smidt van Gelder, gave it to the Louvre the following year. In 1952 the art historian Charles Sterling read it as an allegory of the five senses, with something on the table for each. The Louvre prefers a vanitas, a reminder that pleasures pass: food and wine, music in the mandora and the open score, gambling in the purse, the cards and the chessboard. It points to the round glass vase of carnations and the mirror on the wall as the usual signs of that theme, and dates the panel to around 1630.