The Draught Players (French: Arnauts jouant aux échecs) is an 1859 oil painting by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.Weinberg, Bolger & Curry p.18-19 A genre painting, it depicts a game of draughts in Cairo. The players have been identified as Arnauts, Albanian soldiers on the service of Egypt.https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/the-draught-players-209313
It typifies the fashionable Orientalism in a European art of the period. The painting featured at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 held in Paris, a retrospective of artworks since 1855.Mainardi p.169-70
The picture was acquired by the Francophile art collector the Marquess of Hertford, having previously belonged to the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. It now forms part of the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square in London.https://wallacelive.wallacecollection.org/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=direct/1/ResultDetailView/result.tab.link&sp=10&sp=Scollection&sp=SelementList&sp=0&sp=0&sp=999&sp=SdetailView&sp=0&sp=Sdetail&sp=0&sp=F&sp=SdetailBlockKey&sp=1
References
Bibliography Ingamells, John. The Wallace Collection: French Nineteenth Century. Trustees of the Wallace Collection, 1985. Mainardi, Patricia. Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867. Yale University Press, 1987. Weinberg, Helene Barbara, Bolger, Doreen & Curry, David Park. American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.