Children Playing Billiards by English School, 19th Century

Antiques > Decorative Arts Dealer: Artware Fineart Contact: Greg Page-Turner - Email Dealer
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Description: Cue sports (sometimes spelled cuesports), also known as billiard sports, are a wide variety of games of skill generally played with a cue stick which is used to strike billiard balls, moving them around a cloth-covered billiards table bounded by rubber cushions. Historically, the umbrella term was billiards. While that familiar name is still employed by some as a generic label for all such games, the word's usage has splintered into more exclusive competing meanings in various parts of the world. For example, in British and Australian English, "billiards" usually refers exclusively to the game of English billiards, while in American and Canadian English it is sometimes used to refer to a particular game or class of games, or to all cue games in general, depending upon dialect and context. There are three major subdivisions of games within cue sports:

Carom billiards, referring to games played on tables without pockets, including among others balkline and straight rail, cushion caroms, three-cushion billiards and artistic billiards Pool, generally played on a table with six pockets, including among others eight-ball (the world's most widely played cue sport), nine-ball, straight pool, one-pocket and bank pool. Snooker, which while technically a pocket billiards game, is generally classified separately based on its historic divergence from other games, as well as a separate culture and terminology that characterize its play. More obscurely, there are games that make use of obstacles and targets, and table-top games played with disks instead of balls. Billiards has a long and rich history stretching from its inception in the 15th century; to the wrapping of the body of Mary, Queen of Scots in her billiard table cover in 1586; through its many mentions in the works of Shakespeare, including the famous line "let's to billiards" in Antony and Cleopatra (1606–07); to the dome on Thomas Jefferson's home Monticello, which conceals a billiard room he hid, as billiards was illegal in Virginia at that time; and through the many famous enthusiasts of the sport including, Mozart, Louis XIV of France, Marie Antoinette, Immanuel Kant, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, George Washington, French president Jules Grévy, Charles Dickens, George Armstrong Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Lewis Carroll, W.C. Fields, Babe Ruth, Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason, and many others.

Inset from School of Recreation, 1710. "We perceive from the engraving of the Billiards of the seventtenth century, that the game was altogether different from what it is now."All cue sports are generally regarded to have evolved into indoor games from outdoor stick-and-ball lawn games (retroactively termed ground billiards), and as such to be related to trucco, croquet and golf, and more distantly to the stickless bocce and bowls. The first known mention of a form of the word "billiards" appears in Edmund Spenser's Mother Hubberd's Tale in 1591, where he speaks of "all thriftles games that may be found ... with dice, with cards, with balliards." The word "billiard" may have evolved from the French word billart or billette, meaning "stick", in reference to the mace, an implement similar to a golf club, which was the forerunner to the modern cue; the term's origin may have also been from French bille, meaning "ball". The modern term "cue sports" can be used to encompass the ancestral mace games, and even the modern cueless variants, such as finger billiards, for historical reasons. "Cue" itself came from queue, the French word for a tail. This refers to the early practice of using the tail of the mace to strike the ball when it lay against a rail cushion.

Status: For Sale	Reference#: 3263
Condition: Good	Year: 19th Century
Country: UK	Maker: English School 19th Century
Height: 25.59 in. (65.00 cm)
Width: 31.89 in. (81.00 cm)
Title: Children Playing Billiards by English School, 19th Century	Style: Traditional
Materials: Oil on canvas

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