The Chess Players — Moritz Retzsch
The Chess Players — Moritz Retzsch
A young man is playing chess with the Devil, and the stake is his own soul. His guardian angel stands behind the board, watching. The pieces at the base of the table are skulls.
The story
Retzsch painted it in 1831, at the height of Europe's obsession with the Faust legend — the bargain, the wager, the soul sold cheap. The Devil is smug. The young man has his head in his hand.
It looks like checkmate. That is the whole point of the picture, and it is why people have argued about it for two centuries.
The legend that grew up around it says the American chess champion Paul Morphy stood in front of a print of this painting, studied the board, and announced that the young man was not beaten at all — that there was still one move on it. Nobody has ever proved the story true. It has outlived the painting's fame anyway, which tells you something about what people want a picture to mean.
What arrives
- Printed on canvas and set in a wooden frame — not a poster, not paper behind glass.
- Made to order after you buy it, then shipped worldwide.
- Moritz Retzsch, 1831. Public domain — free to reproduce, which is the only reason a canvas like this can cost what it does.
- Reproduced from a full-resolution scan of the original painting.
Good to know
Screens are backlit and canvas is not. Colours read deeper and softer on the wall than they do here. Sizes are the framed dimensions. This painting is wider than it is tall, and the sizes below match its proportions almost exactly.
Buy any two prints, the third is half price. Applied automatically at checkout — no code needed.
Finish the wall
Four pictures worth owning for what happened in them. Each is sized to its own proportions, so pick the scale that suits your wall.
