Triumph of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

            My previous image prompted me to dig out my chess set, which I'd not seen for years. It was my mother's and it came with her from Vienna to Melbourne. As a child I watched her play on it against her own mother from time to time. In a brief period of teen-age enthusiasm I used it myself.
 
I was unaware that this had been a very common style of chessmen throughout Austria and surrounding countries for many years in the 19th and 20th centuries. Such sets were associated with Viennese Coffee House culture, and the style is now therefore described as "Coffee House" or "Old Vienna". Examples are presumably not yet very rare in Austria today, but they surely must be in Australia.
 
Web research suggests this one was made by a manufacturer of the name Nekvasil.  The pieces are wooden, and with the exception of the knights, they could all be turned on a lathe, while the Kings, Queens, and Rooks needed only a few notches cut out to suggest crowns and crenels. The Bishops' stylised mitres were always of the enemy's colour. The pieces (possibly cherry sapwood) are noticeably light, but having only thin paper glued to their bases, as glimpsed here on the black king, they can make a decidedly challenging clack when put down on their squares, the inverted wooden box becoming a sounding board as well as the playing board. You can signal diffidence or confidence, felt or feigned... One pawn has lost a small chip, but the full set survives, and is shown in a comment below.

I can identify fifteen triangles in this composition, allowing a little tolerance and discrimination at the vertices of the two grey ones. The black King's shadow and reflection are convoluted.  As for the Four Horsemen, their apocalyptic purposes have evidently been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries.  War, Conquest, Famine, and Plague seem an apt selection...

Taken on: June 7, 2022

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Camera: Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II, f/6.3, 1/125 sec, 20.9mm (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II
Aperture:	f/6.3
Exposure Time:	0.008 sec (1/125)
Focal Length:	20.9mm
Exposure Bias:	+1/2 EV
Flash:	No Flash
Exposure Program:	Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
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