The Card Players
Two peasants play cards in silence. Cézanne painted the subject in several versions and built the figures as simple, solid forms.
The bottle in the middle divides the picture into two mirrored halves.
Paul Cézanne came from Aix-en-Provence in the south of France and spent most of his later life there. In the early 1890s he began painting a series of pictures of peasants playing cards. The series consists of five paintings. Three show two players facing each other; two show more players and onlookers. The version in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris is one of those with two players and is usually dated to around 1893–1896.
Two men sit at a table playing cards. The man on the left is smoking a pipe. Both wear hats and simple work clothes. They are entirely absorbed in their cards and do not look up. On the table between them stands a wine bottle that divides the picture into two mirrored halves. The background is plain and dark. The tablecloth is reddish-brown, and the men’s clothes are in blue, brown and yellow.
The models were labourers and peasants from the area around Aix, probably from the family estate, the Jas de Bouffan. Exactly who they were is not known. Cézanne chose ordinary people and portrayed them with dignity and gravity. The pictures have none of the liveliness and anecdote often found in earlier genre scenes of card players. He had the men sit for long sessions, and they seem entirely at ease with being observed.
The composition is built from simple, solid forms. The bodies, arms and hats resemble geometric solids. Cézanne later wrote in a letter that one should treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. He was not trying to capture a moment, as the Impressionists did, but something lasting and solid.
The colours are muted: blue, brown, ochre and green. Cézanne built up the forms with short, parallel brushstrokes and small patches of colour that form planes. The perspective is deliberately slightly shifted. The edge of the table is not straight, and the figures sit slightly differently in space. This gives the picture a tension between depth and surface.
The Musée d’Orsay version came to the French state through the bequest of the collector Isaac de Camondo and was moved there from the Louvre in 1986. Another two-player version is in the Courtauld Gallery in London. A third was sold in 2011 to the State of Qatar for one of the highest prices ever paid for a painting, according to press reports.
Cézanne gained recognition late in life. After his death in 1906 he became one of the most important models for young artists in Paris. Picasso and Braque built on his way of breaking forms down into planes, and Cubism counted him among its roots. The Card Players is regarded as one of his most significant series.