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.
The above artwork is a good example of American paintings in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The painting depicts a scene of a game of cards going on between some men. They are all dressed in black coats though one of them has taken it out, revealing his black waistcoat. The players at table wear wear French style caps- two of them in black and one wearing a red cap. The fourth person, an American of African descent is shown sitting at the corner, near the wall, on the left side of the painting- a glimpse of a slowly growing and expanding American society both in population and acceptance. The painting also gives a view into the pass time leisure of some men during that period.
