A young girl, a woman and an elderly woman selling vegetables, fruit, bread, nuts and wine

The anonymous Maître des Jeux owes his sobriquet to Jean-Pierre Cuzin, who, in his critique (A Hypothesis concerning the Le Nain Brothers, The Burlington Magazine, XX, no. 909, Dec. 1978, p. 875), of the 1978 Le Nain exhibition first withdrew a group of nine pictures from the corpus of the Le Nain brothers. The common characteristics of that group include, most notably, the use of a strong and sharp light directed from the side to casting long shadows on the ground, a sober compositional arrangement and clearly defined forms. The Maître was probably a Northern artist working in Paris and deeply influenced by the Le Nain brothers (P. Rosenberg, Tout l'Oeuvre peint des Le Nain, Paris, 1993, p. 97.)