The Card Players
Artist: Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906)
Style: French Post-Impressionist
Date: 1890–1892
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY, United States
Description
Cézanne was in his fifties when he undertook a painting campaign devoted to giving memorable form to a subject that inspired the likes of Caravaggio and Chardin. He was determined from the start - as we see in this sturdy Provençal scene - to make it his own. Cézanne carefully crafted this composition from figure studies he had made of local farmhands. Once he had puzzled-out his conception, he continued to fine-tune the poses and positions of the card players, until they - like the four pipes hanging on the wall behind them - each fell perfectly into place. Cézanne channeled the quiet authority he achieved here into a much larger variant (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) and punctuated the series with three works in which he pared away extraneous details to focus his gaze on a pair of players.