A Perspective on Chess

One of the best known chess paintings reveals some of its technical secrets. I had to brighten both images, but the results were worth it.

Top: The Chess Players | Thomas Eakins
Bottom: Perspective Drawing for the 'Chess Players'
Both: © Flickr user museado under Creative Commons.

The links for the corresponding museum pages were:-

Top: The Chess Players, 1876 (metmuseum.org)
Bottom: Perspective Drawing for the 'Chess Players' (ditto)

The description for the top portion said,

Thomas Eakins, American, 1844–1916, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • 11 3/4 x 16 3/4 in. (29.8 x 42.6 cm) • Medium: Oil on wood • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY • Gift of the artist, 1881

The description for the bottom said,

[Ditto] • 24 x 19 in. (61 x 48.3 cm) • Medium: Graphite and ink on cardboard • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY • Fletcher Fund, 1942

The metmuseum.org page for the painting said,

In this painting, the artist’s father watches a chess game between two friends in a Renaissance Revival parlor of a Philadelphia home. Eakins honored his father with a Latin inscription on the drawer of the chess table, which translates as "Benjamin Eakins’s son painted this in '76." A reproduction of a painting by Eakins’s principal French teacher, Jean-Léon Gérôme, hangs over the mantel.

Eakins adhered to Gérôme’s academic lessons in his careful spatial construction and meticulous detail. In 1881 The Chess Players became the first work to be accepted by the Metropolitan Museum as a gift from a living artist.

I cropped out the top half of the 'Perspective Drawing'. It showed sketches of the table with the wine decanter & glasses and of the two players' chairs.