Card Players

Pietro Falca called Longhi (1700/02-1785) was born in Venice and trained there with Antonio Balestra and then probably in Bologna with the genre painter Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665-1747). He appears as a member of the Fraglia, the Venetian guild of painters, in 1737. Around the same period, he specialised in small-scale genre paintings for which he is renowned. He trained his son, Alessandro (1733-1813), who specialised in portraits.

This painting is a good imitation and yet not a direct copy of a genre scene by Pietro Longhi showing card players in a Venetian domestic interior. Illustrating a common activity of the Noble Venetian life, this genre scene is also a family portrait representing the husband and wife in the foreground with their child and his nurse standing behind the table. Two servants, a man and a woman, are also included in the scene.