For some, gambling is a vice and a quick way to perdition; for others it’s their main social activity and favourite entertainment. Many nations and societies have tried to ban it: it was illegal in the Roman Republic, except during the Saturnalia in December, and is strictly forbidden under Muslim law. It has been endemic in other societies and eras, including east Asian nations such as China during much of its recorded history.

In this and the next article I explore how gambling has been portrayed in European paintings, from Hieronymus Bosch to Félix Vallotton. I start today with the theme of gambling as a vice to be condemned, and conclude tomorrow with its better side.

For Hieronymus Bosch and his patrons, gambling was definitely one of the cardinal sins. It appears in the garden of Hell in the right panel of his magnificent Garden of Earthly Delights from about 1495-1505. In this damning conclusion, figures are mutilated and tormented in a nightmare landscape dominated by non-human creatures and alarming objects, where gambling takes the foreground.

In the foreground, a huge blue bird, wearing a cauldron on its head and swallowing a whole human, presides over the scene. That bird is sat on an elevated commode, defaecating blue bubbles containing the people it has been ingesting. Faces stare up from the foul brown waters of the cesspit underneath.

The two main groups of victims here are clustered around objects associated with gaming and gambling, and those for making music, then associated with the work of the devil, and immoral activities such as dancing. Playing cards are scattered on the ground beneath an overturned gaming table, and dice are balanced precariously on an index finger and on the head of a naked woman. From among that cluster of figures, a pair of dark blue non-human arms holds high a backgammon board with three dice.

Attitudes to gambling were very different in Caravaggio’s Italy. In The Cardsharps of about 1595, a well-heeled androgynous boy has been tricked into a game of cards by a couple of crooks. The older of the cheats stands behind the boy’s left shoulder, signalling the cards in his hand to his accomplice, a younger boy who is playing the game. The younger cheat has a couple of cards tucked behind him, and is reaching for one of them with his right hand. Secured very visibly to his belt is a small dagger. At the lower left corner is a backgammon set, with three tiny dice on the board.

Caravaggio’s painting was a great success, so was copied with various degrees of fidelity, and inspired similar works.

Valentin de Boulogne’s Soldiers Playing Cards and Dice (The Cheats), from about 1618-20, elaborates the motif with a larger group of men, the signalling accomplice seen at the upper left, and another pair playing dice.

Georges de La Tour’s The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds (c 1635) develops the motif further. There are now three figures playing cards, and their money is laid on the table. At the right is the victim, another androgynous boy, his eyes cast down at his hand of cards, and a large pile of gold coins in front of him. At the left, a dashing man glances sideways at the viewer, his cards almost concealed in front of him. His left hand reaches behind him to pluck the ace of diamonds from under the belt on his back.

The courtesan sitting opposite in a low-cut dress isn’t above suspicion either. She looks shiftily towards the maidservant who has just filled her drink, and the maid looks sideways towards the victim, as if the two of them are also conspiring to cheat him of some of those coins. He’s just about to learn the hard way of that dangerous combination of gambling, loose women, and alcohol.

Alcohol, and that other vice tobacco, are cited in David Teniers the Younger’s The Dice Shooters (1630-50). In common with other paintings of card-playing and gambling in the Dutch Golden Age, it’s set in a dingy room in a rough tavern. Drawing on their clay pipes and with glasses of beer in hand, a group of men appear completely absorbed in gambling their large stacks of coins on the throw of their dice.

Gambling was seen by the British moralising narrative artists of the eighteenth century as one more step on the road to sinful death. Tom Rakewell, the lead in William Hogarth’s series A Rake’s Progress, saves himself from his first decline by marrying money in the form of an ugly old spinster.

He then takes his new wife’s money off to a gambling den, where, surrounded by London’s low-life, he pleads to the Almighty for one last chance to recover his fortune, in both senses of riches and luck.

Hogarth’s successor Thomas Rowlandson finds a less chaotic scene at The Gaming Table, which he painted in watercolour in 1801. It still doesn’t look a friendly place, though, and there are no women present. The players here are putting their stakes on dice, which are about to be revealed by the man at the far right of the table, who seems to have been raking the money in.

In 1822 Théodore Géricault compiled a series of ten portraits of people suffering from mental illness, then described as monomanias. He was introduced to these patients by one of the early practitioners of psychiatry, his friend Doctor Étienne-Jean Georget (1795-1828), who commissioned him to paint them to show to students as examples. Georget was the first psychiatrist to propose that insanity should be a defence to criminal charges. The Monomaniac of Gambling (c 1821-23) shows an older man holding a crutch.

Although Gustave Courbet’s portrait of the operatic singer Louis Gueymard (1822–1880) as Robert le Diable (1857) shows the last scene in Act 1 of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable (1831), its message is clear. In this scene, Gueymard’s character Robert gambles away his entire estate on dice; in the opera this is marked by the aria L’or est une chimère: ‘gold is but an illusion’.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is less convinced. In his watercolour of Hesterna Rosa from 1865, he shows a moment from the contemporary play Philip van Artevelde, written by Henry Taylor in 1834. Van Artevelde was a Flemish patriot who lived between about 1340-1382, and led the Ghent rebellion in 1381, only to be crushed to death in battle the following year. In Taylor’s play, van Artevelde has a relationship with a woman of lower class; in this scene, his lover has paused to reflect on her life while he plays dice with a friend. The painting’s title means yesterday’s rose, and draws on the theme of the fallen woman, which was so popular with Rossetti.

William Quiller Orchardson sounds a more cautionary note in his Hard Hit (1879). The fashionably-dressed young man about to open the door on the left is walking away from a group of older villains, who have stopped at nothing (including perhaps cheating) to beat him repeatedly at cards, and have relieved him of his wealth.

Valentine Cameron Prinsep’s Venetian Gaming-House in the Sixteenth Century shows far more opulent and fashionable surroundings, but is a scene of confrontation between two young men at the card table of this gambling den in Venice. The man seated on the left, whose family appear to be backing him, has accumulated substantial winnings, and is reaching across the table for more. The man standing on the right, who seems to be losing badly, has an accusative look, and is clearly unhappy with his opponent’s success. Both men are armed, and under the table is a large collection of cards that may have been involved in a cheat.

In the sixteenth century, gambling took place in Venice in private premises. But in 1638, the city fathers opened Europe’s first public casino in a wing of the Palazzo Dandolo, known as Il Ridotto. It aimed for the most affluent, with high stakes and a strict dress code, requiring tricorn hats and masks at its tables. It closed its doors in 1774, to preserve “piety, sound discipline and moderate behaviour”.

Could gambling possibly be innocent fun, even virtuous?