CHARLES WILDA | A GAME OF CHESS, CAIRO

Chess is believed to be derived from the Indian game chaturanga sometime before the seventh century. Chaturanga is also the likely ancestor of the Eastern strategy games xiangqi (Chinese chess), janggi (Korean chess), and shogi (Japanese chess). Chess reached Europe by way of the Middle East during the ninth century, following the Umayyad conquest of Spain. However, the modern rules were standardised in the nineteenth century.

Born in Vienna in 1854, Charles Wilda trained at the Viennese Akademie der Bildenden Künste under Karl Leopold Müller. Like many of his fellow Orientalist painters, he travelled to Egypt in the early 1880s and set up a studio in Cairo where he developed a keen interest for the depiction of everyday Egyptian life. Wilda exhibited widely in Vienna and Berlin, and at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. In the year of his death, the Künstlerhaus in Vienna honoured him with his first retrospective.