Duchamp painted The Chess Game at Puteaux, where his brothers lived in adjoining properties and the outdoor garden behind their studios, with its tables, chairs and sagging chestnut tree, served as a venue for everything from chess to archery on fine weekends^[1]. Chess was the predominant activity there, and it was in that setting that Duchamp made his first painting on the subject: an outdoor scene showing his two bearded brothers absorbed in a game while their wives lounged nearby^[1]. The picture is heavy in greens and painted in a manner close to Cezanne, reflecting the influence Duchamp was working through at the time, well before his later, more fractured Cubist treatment of the same subject^[1].

Chess entered the Duchamp household through Marcel's two older brothers, and by age thirteen Marcel himself was playing seriously^[1]. He described the game's structure of opening, tactical middle stages and end game as something he came to treat almost as a template for life itself, and observers later agreed his own endgame play was his strongest^[1]. He was particularly close to his younger sister Suzanne, with whom he also played chess as a child^[1]. That childhood habit, rather than any adult discovery of the game, is the root of chess's presence across so much of Duchamp's early work, this painting included.

The Chess Game marks an early point in Duchamp's development, made before he began attending the meetings his brother Jacques organised with the Puteaux Group in 1911, which drew him toward Cubism and the fractured, doubled figures of his later chess paintings and Nude Descending a Staircase^[2]. Within a couple of years of finishing this picture, Duchamp had moved past Cubism entirely and largely abandoned traditional painting, turning instead to readymades: everyday objects such as a bicycle wheel and, in 1917, a signed urinal titled Fountain, presented as art by the artist's choice alone rather than by any hand-made skill^[3]. Chess, by contrast, only became a more serious and structured part of his life as painting receded.