Chess Problem 25 (13th century), from El Libro de los Juegos.
Chess-playing in art. Some of it, anyway. I hadn’t realised until I went searching for examples how many paintings there are of people playing chess. The prompt for this was my current reading, The Flanders Panel, a novel from 1990 by the Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Arturo likes his art mysteries, as you’ll know if you’ve read The Club Dumas, an excellent novel that was reworked for cinema as The Ninth Gate. The chess game in The Flanders Panel is the subject of a painting by a fictional Flemish artist, Pieter Van Huys. Pérez-Reverte presents a biography of the artist and the three people depicted in the painting, with special attention given to the game of chess which gives the painting its title, a game which may or may not provide clues to a 15th-century murder mystery. Pérez-Reverte describes the painting itself in detail; Julia, the main character is a picture restorer so the descriptions extend to physical materials. Some of the novel’s cover designs have attempted to depict Van Huys’s picture, with unsuccessful results. There’s also a 1994 film adaptation, Uncovered, which I haven’t yet seen.
The Chess Player (no date) by Isidor Kaufmann.
I’ll admit to not having thought very much about chess-playing in art until the conversation in the novel turned to the subject of the painted game, and the question of whether or not the position of the pieces had anything to say about the people in the picture. (Pérez-Reverte helpfully includes a diagram that shows the layout of the board.) There’s no reason why a game of chess shouldn’t be used for semiotic reasons even if this is only to indicate the power relationship within a picture by making one party the dominant player. Given the ease with which this can be done I’d guess there are many such examples that use the game to communicate something about the players beyond the fact that they enjoy playing chess. If you’re painting a chess game you’re always going to be faced with the question of how you position the pieces, a problem that leads in turn to decisions about who should be shown to be winning or losing via the number of pieces and their placement on the board. Western art is replete with pictorial symbolism involving animals, plants, birds, colours, and so on; if the very old and very familiar game of chess is added to the symbolic repertoire then we’re left to decide which paintings are using the game for incidental reasons, and which have something more to communicate.
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An Interesting Problem (no date) by Adolphe-Alexandre Lesrel.
In making a picture selection I’ve looked for paintings that clearly show the position of the pieces on the board, as well as those which depict the game with some accuracy. It becomes apparent when you examine many paintings on this subject that some artists don’t seem too familiar with the details of the game, a common error being the mispositioned board. This could also have a symbolic meaning, of course, but I’ll leave that question for others to explore. As a final note, Marcel Duchamp had a thing for chess.
Ein schwieriger Zug Öl auf Holz (no date) by Albert Joseph Franke.
Die Schachspieler (Faust und Mephisto) (1834) by Moritz Retzsch.
