Dice have been thrown and rolled by people throughout recorded history. Early dice were often irregular, made of bone or stone and used primarily for gambling. Although they don’t appear to have played any significant role in mythology, their role in the events of the Crucifixion is well recorded in the New Testament Gospels.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s huge and magnificent Crucifixion from 1565 depicts the biblical account of guards gambling with dice, as seen in the detail below.

On the left of this detail, two men are gambling with dice in a small rock shelter suggestive of a tomb. To the right of them, a gravedigger has just started his work with a spade.

The Christian Church has generally taken a dim view of gambling, and shunned dice. Several artists have expressed this in paint, but none so forcefully as Hieronymus Bosch.

For 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. 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.

Not all cultures have been as damning, though.

Albert Anker turns to classical times to put his spin on gambling games in his Knucklebone Players (1864). Three youths are here playing a game of greater skill, but still frequently the basis of gambling. The distinguished men in the background are hardly the sort to frequent a gambling den, surely?

Nevertheless, playing with dice continued as a cardinal sign of sin.

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 this period, 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 are completely absorbed in gambling large stacks of coins on the throw of their dice.

William Hogarth’s successor Thomas Rowlandson painted his Gaming Table in watercolour in 1801. 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.

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, so popular with Rossetti.

Murillo’s Young Boys Playing Dice of about 1675 adopts a different theme, of gambling among the poor and vulnerable. Two scruffy urchins from the streets of Seville are throwing dice for the small piles of change which are probably their entire fortunes. A third stands over them, chewing at a bread roll while his dog looks up longingly at the food.

The overwhelming majority of paintings of interiors show rooms we might aspire to. In this last of the series, I show some we’d all hope to avoid, those of the poor and destitute. Although never really popular as motifs, there have always been a few artists prepared to tackle the ills and inequalities in society, and this became increasingly frequent in the 1880s.

In common with other paintings of inns in the Dutch Golden Age, David Teniers the Younger’s The Dice Shooters (1630-50) is 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.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo is one of the earliest artists to have paid particular attention to the poor. The Young Beggar, painted in about 1645, shows a young boy squatting in a tiny bare nook in a building. By his filthy feet is a bag full of rotting fruit, and some sort of worms, which apparently form his diet.

François-Auguste Biard’s undated sketchy view In a Mountain Hut may have been made in front of the motif, onto paper. This is unusually social realist for this artist, showing the abject poverty and spartan conditions of many who lived in the more remote areas of France at that time.

It was the Naturalist paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage in the early 1880s that brought depictions of the poor to success in the Salon.

Typical of his portraits is The Little Chimneysweep (Damvillers), one of his last paintings, completed in 1883. This young chimneysweep sitting in his tiny hovel with a stray cat and kitten has the air of authenticity. The hand grasping that slab of bread is still black with soot. Bastien painted this in his home village in northern France.

Antonino Gandolfo’s Compensation (1880-85) depicts prostitution in the city of Catania on the east coast of the island of Sicily, Italy. The man settling his bill is only seen by his hand holding out money, and a foot. The young woman holding out her hand to receive looks away in shame, and wears scarlet to advertise her trade.

We remain in the poor quarter of Catania for Gandolfo’s The Last Coin (c 1880-85). A young woman, who has been spinning, sits on an old chest and takes the last money from her purse, presumably to pay for some milk to fill her blue and white jug. Her family stand with their heads bowed in the gloom behind.

Vincent van Gogh’s early paintings of Nuenen, such as The Potato Eaters from April 1885, depict poor peasant families, here eating inside their dingy cottage lit by a single oil lamp.

Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888 shows a pair of charitable bourgeois ladies arriving at the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a small table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, quite likely absinthe.