The Chess Players, 1876 Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Thomas Eakins also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Chess Players is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.

The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A small yellow chessman glows like a coal at the centre of the table. Around it, three men bend into a hush so complete that one can almost hear the carpet swallowing every sound. Thomas Eakins gives us a game, yes, but also a room thinking about itself: polished wood, carved furniture, framed pictures, red upholstery, and a little grey dog at lower right who seems magnificently uninterested in human strategy.

The Chess Players, painted in 1876, is set in a Renaissance Revival parlor in Philadelphia, and it has the affectionate exactness of something known from the inside. Eakins’s father, Benjamin, is not one of the players but the attentive onlooker, hovering over the match between two friends. That is important. This is not a family portrait in the usual sense, but an act of filial recognition. On the drawer of the chess table, Eakins placed a Latin inscription that means, in effect, Benjamin Eakins’s son painted this in 1876. It is touching without being sentimental.

Warm browns dominate: walnut, umber, tobacco, old varnish. Against them, the red carpet presses forward, dense and patterned, while the chess pieces make a tiny theatre of ivory and black. Light falls softly rather than dramatically; it clarifies cuffs, faces, and the tabletop, then loosens into the darker carved panels behind. Notice the pale sleeve of the seated player on the right, a quick firm note beside the black coat. It is a small hinge of paint, but it steadies the whole exchange of gazes and hands.

Across the mantel hangs a reproduction after Jean-Léon Gérôme, Thomas Eakins’s French teacher, and the reference is more than decoration. Gérôme’s discipline is there in the ordered space, the crisp placement of objects, the refusal to let anecdote become muddle. Yet Eakins is cooler, plainer, more American Realism than Parisian display. Chardin comes to mind too, in the way concentration becomes a moral atmosphere.

What feels slightly unexpected is how crowded the room is, and how solitary each mind remains. The men sit close enough to touch, but the real action is inward, behind brows and beards. When the painting entered the Metropolitan Museum in 1881 as a gift from a living artist, it brought with it not spectacle but thoughtfulness. Perhaps that is why it still feels so companionable: it trusts quiet intelligence, and lets us sit with it.