Oil on canvas, 'Checkmate', Charles Meer Webb, 1864

Oil on canvas; Two men playing chess in a domestic interior

Bequeathed by John Forster

Bequeathed by John Forster, 1876


Charles Meer Webb (1830-1895) was born on 16th July 1830, probably near London, although some reports suggest that his birth was at Breda in the Netherlands. He studied art at the Academies of Amsterdam, Anvers and Düsseldorf. Webb moved to the latter in 1848 and whilst there he became a pupil of Wilhelm Camphausen. He occasionally worked in Anvers and Cleves but settled and remained largely in Düsseldorf for the majority of his life. He made a name for himself particularly as a painter of genre subjects and some of his most successful and well received paintings were taken from English life and history. He died in early December 1895 from injuries sustained from a fall.

Checkmate (1864) is painted in a style that was typical of Webb’s genre paintings. It depicts a domestic interior scene where one player has bested the other in a game of chess. A critic for the Art Journal wrote of it thus: ‘the two players represented are evidently old hands at the game, and doubtless the spectacled veteran, who accepts his defeat so genially, is fully prepared again to measure swords with his opponent of the church warden pipe.’(1) There is another version of this subject, dated 1866, in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Bibliography
1. ‘Checkmate’ in Art Journal, (April 1909), p.109

F.40