Billiards. Billiards, a popular pastime since the 15th century, has been a recurring theme in paintings. The game has been depicted in various artworks, reflecting the social, cultural, and historical contexts of the times. In the early years, billiards was a game primarily played by the European nobility and aristocracy. Consequently, it was featured in paintings that showcased the luxurious lifestyles of the upper classes. One such example is Billiard Players by the Flemish Baroque artist Gonzales Coques, which portrays two elegantly dressed men engaged in a game. As billiards became more accessible to the middle class, it began to appear in paintings that depicted everyday life. For example, The Billiard Table by the French painter Louis Léopold Boilly shows a group of middle-class men playing billiards in a public billiard room. Some artists used billiards as a means of social commentary, reflecting on the vices and virtues of the time. In The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs by the French painter Georges de La Tour, a woman is seen cheating at cards while her accomplice distracts her opponent by pointing at a billiards game in the background. Billiards was often associated with cafés and bars, which were popular social gathering places. Artists like Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas captured the lively atmosphere of these establishments in their paintings. Manet's The Billiard Player and Degas' The Billiard Game both depict people playing billiards in café settings. As women's roles in society evolved, they began to participate in activities traditionally reserved for men, including billiards. This shift is reflected in paintings such as The Billiard Room by the American artist Mary Cassatt, which shows a woman confidently lining up a shot while her male companion watches. Billiards has also been used as a symbol in art. In some cases, it represents the fleeting nature of life, as seen in Vanitas Still Life with a Billiard Table by Harmen Steenwyck. In other instances, it symbolizes the complexities of human relationships, as in The Billiard Players by the Swiss Surrealist artist Paul Klee. Carom billiards, also called French billiards and sometimes carambole billiards, is the overarching title of a family of cue sports generally played on cloth-covered, billiard tables. In its simplest form, the object of the game is to score or counts by one's own off both the opponent's cue ball and the on a single shot. The invention as well as the exact date of origin of carom billiards is somewhat obscure but is thought to be traceable to 18th-century France. There is a large array of carom billiards disciplines. Some of the more prevalent today and historically are: straight rail, one-cushion, balkline, three-cushion and artistic billiards. Carom billiards is popular in Europe, particularly France, where it originated. It is also popular in Asian countries, including Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Vietnam, but is now considered obscure in North America, having been supplanted by pool in popularity. The Union Mondiale de Billard is the highest international governing body of competitive carom billiards. The word carom, which simply means any strike and rebound, was in use in reference to billiards by at least 1779, sometimes spelled carrom. Sources differ on the origin. It has been pegged variously as a shortening of the Spanish and Portuguese word carambola, or the French word carambole, which are used to describe the red object ball. Some etymologists have suggested that carambola, in turn, was derived from a yellow-to-orange, tropical Asian fruit also known in Portuguese as a carambola, also known as star fruit. But this may simply be folk etymology, as the fruit bears no resemblance to a billiard ball, and there is no direct evidence for such a derivation. In modern French, the word means 'successive collision', currently used mainly in reference to or shots in billiards, and to multiple-vehicle car crashes. The billiard table used for carom billiards is a pocketless version and is typically 3.0 by 1.5 metres. Most cloth made for carom billiard tables is a type of baize that is typically dyed green and is made from 100% worsted wool with no nap, which provides a very fast surface allowing the balls to travel with little resistance across the table. The slate bed of a carom billiard table is often heated to about 5 °C above room temperature, which helps to keep moisture out of the cloth to aid the balls rolling and rebounding in a consistent manner, and generally makes a table play faster.