Chess Players

Cornelis de Man
c. 1670
Oil on canvas, 97.5 x 85 cm.
Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest
Cornelis de Man

MAN, Cornelis de
Born 1621, Delft—Died 1706, Delft

De Man spent several years in Italy and France, an experience from which he did not greatly benefit for when he returned home he produced works with an abundance of detail, chiefly conversation pieces depicting middle-class life, in the manner of Vermeer and de Hooch. Although Pieter de Hooch had no recorded pupils he influenced and was imitated by other painters in Delft and Amsterdam, and since his own original works decline in his later period, his followers, among them de Man, come at times pretty close to him.