A Game of Backgammon
Provenance
Ercolani Family, Bologna, for several generations until 2020
Bibliography
Vitale Bloch, Michael Sweerts: suivi de Sweerts et les missions étrangères par Jean Guennou, The Hague, 1968, p. 23, fig. 18.
Rolf Kultzen, ‘Französische Anklänge im Werk von Michael Sweerts’, in Anne-Marie Logan, ed., Essays in Northern European Art Presented to Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann on his Sixtieth Birthday, Doornspijk, 1983, pp. 128–29, reproduced fig. 2.
Rolf Kultzen, Michael Sweerts: Brussels 1618–Goa 1664, Ghent, 1996, pp. 31, 100, cat. no. 44, reproduced pl. 44.
Peter C. Sutton, ‘Introduction’, in Guido Jansen and Peter C. Sutton, Michael Sweerts (1618–1644), Amsterdam, 2002, exh. cat., p. 16, reproduced fig. 11.
Essay
Undoubtedly one of the most sought-after artists from the 17th century today, Michael Sweerts is recognized for his marked individuality and unique ability to infuse everyday subjects with a remarkable pathos and the solemn monumentality of classical art. Best known for painting dandies, artist studios, exotic oriental characters, bathers and wrestlers, and life on the fringes of society in Rome, these subjects may reflect his own adventurous life that took him from the Low Countries to Rome, Paris, the Far East, ultimately to wander off from his religious expedition and die in Goa. Sweerts’s penchant for haunting spotlit scenes evoke a silent lyricism and enigmatic aura which has a parallel in that of Vermeer, a contemporary with whom he shared a reputational revival in the beginning of the 20th-century.
A Game of Backgammon is a significant recent rediscovery by Michael Sweerts. Large and compositionally ambitious, it is an important work from Sweerts’s time in Rome. It is one of five paintings by the artist depicting men playing games—the other four are in the Musée du Louvre (fig. 1), the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (fig. 2), the Rijksmuseum (fig. 3) and the Mauritshuis (fig. 4).
Completed around the same time as the Rijksmuseum Painter’s Studio (fig. 5), circa 1648-50, A Game of Backgammon similarly features a motley assembly of figures inside a moody interior. Their shared artistic vocabulary extends to the dramatically foreshortened tiled floor, the backlit seated figure in the left (which became his favorite motif), a cluster of luscious still life in the lower right, and the bright burst of sky beyond the distant doorway. The 1652 Game of Draughts in the Mauritshuis (fig. 2), the only other time when Sweerts depicted a board game (the others are playing dice), belongs to a later, more polished phase. Interestingly, that picture had once belonged to the Victorian painter John Everett Millais.
At a central table draped with an exotic Turkey carpet, two fashionably dressed men are here absorbed in a game of backgammon, while a third, standing to the right, keeps an eye on the high stakes. Behind this group, two young women are being approached by a red capped man. With a defiant smile, the lady holding a songbook looks askance in the direction of the seated lutenist, as does the gamer with his back towards us, depicted in profile. Suspense thickens as one wonders whether the other musician, whose instrument lies haphazardly over a yellow cloak and a pile of open scores, will return to resume playing. By far the largest figure in this composition, the lutenist—a popular motif among the Caravaggisti—in the foreground is the only one to meet our eyes; his assured expression and resemblance to the artist’s portrayals of himself (fig. 6) could well indicate that it is a self-portrait, as Kultzen has suggested. Indeed, Sweerts is known to insert his own visage into compositions, as exemplified by works such as his intriguing Portrait of the Artist Presenting the Virgin in Prayer (fig. 7). Against the soft notes of the lutenist’s ballade, other sounds might have been heard: the playful dog, the servant boys and the scurrying ascent of amorous couples up the staircase. But a feeling of solitude pervades, as none of the gazes meet.
While brothel and tavern scenes had been popular for decades in Rome, favored especially by the Caravaggisti, any hint of drunkenness or lascivious excess is absent from the present picture. Unlike the lighthearted approach of Pieter van Laer and his followers, known as the ‘Bamboccianti’, Sweerts characteristically treats his subjects with compassion and dignity.Taking a cue from Caravaggio in staging biblical subjects in the guise of contemporary life, Sweerts produced a number of such canvases in Rome, for example, Clothing the Naked (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, SK-A-2847). In this vein, it is tempting to think that the restrained quality of A Game of Backgammon may have a more serious message: namely the Parable of the Prodigal Son, a popular subject for artists which shows a youth who squanders his fortune on wine and women before returning home, poor and repentant. A striking parallel exists between the present painting and a sixteenth-century engraving of the Prodigal Son Dissipating His Patrimony in a Brothel (fig. 8) by the Dutch artist Cornelis Anthonisz (ca. 1505-1553). The print shows a man (Mundus, representing the world) sitting in the foreground, while the prodigal son sits behind a backgammon board, surrounded by female figures representing Caro (Lust), Haeresis (Heresy), Avaritia (Avarice) and Vanitas (Vanity); The mise-en-scène similarly shows an interior with a tiled floor and a doorway in the distance revealing a landscape view. By the 1600s, the game of backgammon had become popular, typically played for money and was often depicted by fellow Northern artist, notably, Theodore Rombouts, David Teniers the Younger, Dirck van Baburen, and the Le Nain Brothers (fig. 9). Even earlier precedents, like Jan Sanders van Hemessen represented it as a critique of human folly, if not immorality. However, such moralistic undertones are not immediately detectable in the present work.
At least seventeen figures are discernable in the present canvas, with a classical elegance and clarity evocative of Plague in an Ancient City, ca. 1650 (fig. 10), Sweerts’s most ambitious intellectual artistic statement. In both works, accents of shimmering white and saturated scarlet, lapis, and ochre punctuate through the dark expanse of the canvases, effectively dividing the space with light and color. Likewise, the grandeur of the present composition makes one wonder if Sweerts painted it just to demonstrate his skills, or whether he had a particular patron in mind.
Sweerts was born into an influential aristocratic family in Brussels around 1618, but little is known about his life before his move to Rome in 1643. From 1646–51 he took up residence on via Margutta, which was popular with the expat community of Northern European artists and patrons. Sweerts painted portraits and other works for local patricians, notably, the Chigi and Pamphilj families, as well as Dutch Grand Tourists such as the Amsterdam-born Deutz Brothers (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, SK-A-3855), even acting as their agent in acquiring artworks. Sweerts was unusually successful in painting on spec, which allowed him to veer off the mainstream. Such was the focal point of the recent Sweerts exhibition at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. Intriguingly, the lady with the songbook in the present painting reappears as the model for Girl Combing Her Hair, ca. 1650. Two different versions exist, in the Accademia di San Luca in Rome and the Museo di Casa Martelli in Florence, respectively (figs. 11 and 12).
Since Sweerts’s first retrospective in the United States in 2002, jointly organized by the Rijksmuseum, Legion of Honor, and the Wadsworth Athenuem, the artist’s ‘star status in the Netherlands’ has evidently spread to the other side of the Atlantic. Although recognition of Sweerts in the United States began in the 1960s, in the 80s his fame took off with a few well publicized acquisitions. Charles Wrightsman bought Clothing the Naked in 1981, at the suggestion of Sir John Pope-Hennesy, which was donated to the Met in 1984. The aforementioned Plague in the Ancient City (fig. 10) came to the U.S. when the late Richard Feigen bought it in the Cook Collection sale in 1984; then it went to Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg before going under the hammer at Sotheby’s New York in 1997. That world auction record for the artist was shattered in 2023, again by a multi-figural composition from his Roman period.
Although known in literature since the 1960s, the whereabouts of the present painting was untraced in the two most recent monographs. It had remained in the historic Ercolani family collection in Bologna for several generations.❖