The card players

The scene in the painting is a card game staged as a small morality tale of deception. as Per the contemporary engraving description: it depicts a card game between a card sharp and an older gentleman traveler in a waiting room, with the gamblers seated at a table under the eye of a young referee standing and smoking a pipe. The young card player stirs a hot toddy while hiding a card under his thigh, and the older traveler rests his hand on a card while glancing past his cheating opponent at a wall mirror. The traveler's Black servant sits behind him near a stove, and the room is cluttered with debris on the floor and layered playbills on the walls near a clock. This kind of tightly composed, anecdotal interior scene is characteristic of Woodville's whole output — he produced a small but accomplished group of genre paintings built on careful draughtsmanship, local color, complex figural groupings, and precise Düsseldorf-school finish, often transposing genre motifs into American settings. He worked closely with the American Art-Union, which purchased and distributed his work to Art-Union patrons and praised him regularly in its Bulletin, and it was through such prints that paintings like this one reached a wide American audience even though Woodville himself lived in Europe. his paintings highly focused on american politics, and the men who run it, with their flaws and banalities.