Card Players in a Drawing Room

The Artist: Pierre Louis Dumesnil the Younger was born into a family of painters. Other than a voyage to Bordeaux between 1756 and 1759, most of his career was spent in Paris, where he was first a professor and then a rector at the Académie de Saint-Luc. Between 1751 and 1774, Dumesnil exhibited a variety of works there, from studies to religious subjects. However, he was primarily a painter of genre scenes, and the domestic interior in Card Players in a Drawing Room is typical of his style.

The Subject: Dumesnil’s subject, a depiction of leisure society filled with anecdotal details from contemporary life, continues in the genre of the tableaux de mode (paintings of fashionable society) pioneered by Jean-François de Troy (see 2019.141.21 and 2019.141.22). Dumesnil deploys his brush less masterfully than de Troy, however. His figures have a naïve quality and the awkward perspective is characteristic of his interiors, in which the inclusion of the ceiling suggests that the viewer is both inside the room and looking down into it. Dumesnil uses the light from the candles and fireplace to create a dramatic effect and a pervasive warm glow.

At the table, four women play quadrille, a four-handed version of ombre (later whist), an extremely fashionable card game in France by the 1750s. As a manual, Les règles du médiateur, relayed of the game, “It is according to the good taste of the French nation, and principally that of the fair sex, that we must relate the general vogue for this game and the predilection it obtains over all others” (C’est au bon goût de la nation française, & principalement du beau sexe, qu’il faut rapporter la vogue générale où est ce jeu, ainsi que la prédilection qu'il a sur tous les autres).[1] Indeed, later writers would rally against quadrille for its association with both women and France. At the table, one woman offers another a pinch of snuff from a gold box. In the left background, a more private, tactile conversation takes place between the figures on the sofa, one of whom is depicted in almost exactly the same pose as the portrait above him. Less happy relations are conveyed between the dog at lower right and the cat, which finds safety on the back of a chair.

The anecdotal details of contemporary life include the figure of a Black, likely enslaved, servant who tends the fire with the aid of tongs and bellows. He is dressed in a combination of standard livery (coat and stockings) and exotic accessories (earring and feathered turban). Theoretically, slavery was illegal inside the borders of France itself and was relegated to the French colonies of Saint-Domingue and the Lesser Antilles (which included islands such as Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Lucia, and St. Kitts). Many of France’s coastal towns, including Nantes, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux, participated in the French slave trade, however, and enslaved Africans were resident in France through a number of legal loopholes taken advantage of by their owners. In edicts of 1716 and 1768, Louis XV praised and ensured the financial success of the slave trade in Bordeaux in particular. While residing in Bordeaux between 1756 and 1759, Dumesnil must have regularly encountered enslaved Africans.

David Pullins 2019

[1] Vétillard, Les regles du mediateur recueillies & expliquées pour l'utilité du beau sexe, & des personnes qui n'ont aucune notion de ce jeu, Paris, 1752, p. iv.

[Duits, London, until 1961; sold for $10,000 to Kleinberger]; [Kleinberger, New York, 1961–75; bequeathed by Harry G. Sperling, last surviving partner of firm, to The Met]

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Elizabeth A. Pergam. "The Met's Reinstallation of Its European Paintings and Northern Renaissance Galleries Aims to Set Exhibits in Their Global Context." Burlington Magazine 166 (April 2024), p. 394.