The Chess Players

This was painted in Delft around 1670, in the years just after Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch had made the town famous for quiet, light-filled rooms. Cornelis de Man was a local man who painted that same world: well-off Delft citizens at ease in their tiled interiors. A man and a woman have nearly finished a game of chess, but the game is really about the two of them. Small things in the room hint at it, the cat, the lute set aside, the bed with its curtain half drawn. De Man builds the space with the careful floor-tile perspective the town's painters had perfected, light falling from the left across the board and the players' hands.