A masterful storyteller who brought an acerbic wit to scenes from everyday life, Gaspare Traversi was one of most original painters in the eighteenth century in Italy. Born in Naples, Traversi was apprenticed as a youth to the elderly Francesco Solimena, as well as carefully studying the works of the naturalist painters of the seventeenth century available to him in his native city, from Preti and Ribera to Caracciolo and Francanzano. From 1752 Traversi spent a great deal of time in Rome, residing alternately there and in Naples.



Although Traversi undertook religious commissions throughout his career, his signature works are without a doubt his genre paintings. Many such works were populated by the urban elite and emerging middle class, while others still trained an eye on the socially marginalized, offering an unparalleled window into the quotidian realities of the impoverished neighbourhoods of eighteenth-century Naples and Rome. Yet while Traversi generally treated the poor with great sympathy, he portrayed the bourgeoisie wearing the costumes and aping the manners of the aristocracy, presenting their aspirations with satirical and humorous, or sometimes moralizing intent.



The five protagonists in the present painting offer a wincing caricature of vice. Two couples are gathered around a table playing cards. The young woman in yellow at right smiles with an ugly sort of glee as she plays her card, clearly heeding the advice of the wizened old woman at her shoulder, who inspects and fingers the cards fanned in her hand. Two of her companions, a young woman in blue and a young man in red, are clearly aware she is cheating—the young man is taken aback, while the young woman looks to her companion with simultaneous annoyance and admiration, or perhaps even envy. Across the table, an older man remains engrossed in his own cards, smilingly oblivious to the underhanded machinations afoot.



The theme of card cheats was a favourite subject for painters of genre scenes from the late sixteenth century onwards, following the example of Caravaggio’s Cardsharps (c. 1594, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas), which in turn inspired works like Caravaggio’s Cardsharps (c. 1594), Valentin de Boulogne’s Cardsharps (c. 1615–18, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden) and Georges de la Tour’s Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (ca. 1630–34, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas) and Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds (c. 1635–38, Musée du Louvre, Paris). It is not at all unreasonable to suppose that Traversi saw works like this, and others of this ilk, in Rome. He visited the city often throughout the 1740s, and from 1752 onwards he began residing alternately there and in his native Naples. Indeed, Traversi painted card players several times during his career; there is an early work in a private collection in Naples, as well as a painting in the Musée des Beaux Arts, Rouen, usually dated the time of his semi-permanent transfer to Rome. The present work, with its brightly clothed figures portrayed on a large scale, is generally dated to around 1753 to 1755, and can be compared with the Seduction in the Koelliker collection, Milan.