A Game of Croquet

The painting shows three women playing a game of croquet, a social pastime of English origin, played on a lawn. It involved hitting wooden balls with a mallet through wire hoops. The scene takes place on a hot summer afternoon. The source of glaring light is on the left. Its wide reflections fall on the ground and on the surface of women’s clothes, creating a flickering glow around their figures, which results in the blurring of contours. The artist also tried to capture the movement of the women, marking it with the multiplication of the outlines of their arms and folds in their dresses. This experiment, involving the simultaneous portrayal of successive phases of movement, was much later to be introduced by Italian and Polish Formists. The work is painted with wide, sometimes flat patches of colour. The artist has boldly juxtaposed large areas of black, red, blue and white, reducing contrasts with the use of yellow and orange reflections.