The Chess Players  1876

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...