The Chess Players
Thomas Eakins
- Institution
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
- Accession
- 81.14
- Credit
- Gift of the artist, 1881
- Rights
Public domain: the artist died in 1916. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.
- Description
- Two elderly men sit over a chessboard in a dim, panelled parlour, each with a hand raised to his face, while a third man stands behind the board watching. Glasses and a decanter of wine stand on a small table at the left, a clock sits on the mantel, and a cat rests on the red carpet.
- Image
- 1600 × 1188
source file retrieved 2026-10-11 - Catalogue no.
- G-009105
coldlibrary.com/g/009105 - Credit line
- Thomas Eakins, The Chess Players, 1876. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009105
Eakins painted this small panel in 1876 and gave it to the Met five years later; the standing man is usually identified as the painter’s father, Benjamin Eakins, watching two friends play. It is a careful picture of thinking, in which nothing moves but attention. Forty years earlier Poe had argued that this kind of thinking could not be done by clockwork, so a person had to be hiding inside Maelzel’s chess-playing automaton.
