The Card Players by Paul Cézanne

The Card Players by Paul Cézanne

Two men, one bottle

Two men sit at a small wooden table, each absorbed in the cards he holds close. The one on the left, in a dark hat and brown jacket, has a white clay pipe in his mouth; the one on the right, in a pale jacket and a battered hat, leans in over the table. Neither looks at the other. A single bottle stands between them and catches the light at the centre of the picture, and the table and the men’s bent arms make a solid, almost symmetrical block. Cézanne builds everything from patches of brown, ochre, green and violet, with no story beyond the game.

A series from Aix

Cézanne painted five pictures of card players in the 1890s, using local farm workers as models, some of whom worked on his family’s estate, the Jas de Bouffan, outside Aix-en-Provence. The earlier versions have more players and onlookers; the last three are reduced to two men. This one is the smallest of the five and is generally considered the last. The other two-player versions are in the Courtauld Gallery in London and a private collection.

Where it hangs

The painting is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and measures 47.5 by 57 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 6,048-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 40 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Musée d’Orsay, Paris · Wikidata Q1165042 · Wikimedia Commons