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Title:: Quarrel at the Backgammon Game Year:: 1680-1700
Artist: Laroon, Marcellus After:  
Medium: etching Provenance:
Period: British 17th Century School/Style:
Catalogs: Hollstein (Dutch0 4;
Wurzbach 4;
Height(mm):
Width(mm):
93
82
Price: $900.00
Description: Fine impression on laid paper trimmed slightly within the platemark, signed in the plate with initials on the edge of the game board. Like many seventeenth-century British artists, Laroon came from elsewhere, in his case, The Hague, which he left in about 1675 to work in England. His prints are few in number – Holstein lists 28, about half of them etchings, half mezzotints – and are apparently quite rare, as neither repositories nor sales are listed for any of them (the British Museum owns most of them). The image here verges on the bizarre, as one player seeks to strangle the other while the latter wields a knife. The print does not have the moralistic tone of a Hogarth, but is clearly an early step in the satiric criticism of human behavior.