“The Card Players” by Paul Cézanne is one in a series of five oil paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist painted during Cézanne’s final period in the early 1890s.
Cézanne’s famous paintings of peasant card players are considered to be among his most iconic and influential works. This version at the Courtauld Gallery portrays just two card players, with one of the players smoking a clay pipe.
Cézanne’s created many preparatory works for the Card Players paintings, which indicates his commitment to this series of paintings.
Rather than posing his players as group playing cards, Cézanne made studies of them individually and only brought them together in his paintings. Many different farm workers came to sit for him throughout this project, often smoking their clay pipes.
Cézanne experimented with his compositions, striving to express the essence of these farmworkers and their traditional card game.
This project resulted in five closely related paintings of different sizes showing men seated at a rustic table playing cards.
One version of The Card Players was sold in 2011 for a price variously estimated at over $250 million, making it the third or fourth most expensive work of art ever sold.
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906) was a Post-Impressionist painter who laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century Impressionism to the 20th century’s Cubism.
Cézanne’s art is characterized by repetitive, exploratory small brushstrokes that build up to form complex color fields, demonstrating his intense study of his subjects.
Cézanne’s explorations of geometric simplification and optical phenomena inspired Picasso and others to experiment with ever more complex views of the same subject and eventually to the fracturing of form.
Cézanne thus sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic inquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect the development of modern art profoundly.
Picasso referred to Cézanne as “the father of us all” and claimed him as “my one and only master!” Other painters such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse acknowledged Cézanne’s genius.
The Card Players
- Title: The Card Players
- Français: Les Joueurs de cartes
- Artist: Paul Cézanne
- Year: 1892-1895
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 60 × 73 cm (23.6 × 28.7 in)
- Museum: Courtauld Gallery
Paul Cézanne
- Name: Paul Cézanne
- Born: 1839 – Aix-en-Provence, France
- Died: 1906 (aged 67) – Aix-en-Provence, France
- Nationality: French
- Movement: Post-Impressionism
- Notable works:
- The Card Players (Barnes Foundation)
- The Card Players (Courtauld Gallery)
- The Card Players (MET)
- Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory
- Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair
- Madame Cézanne
- Bathers (The National Gallery, London)
- The Large Bathers (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
- Bathers by Paul Cézanne (Art Institute of Chicago)
- Bathers by Paul Cézanne (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC)
Cézanne’s Card Players
A Tour of the Courtauld Gallery
- “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” by Édouard Manet
- “The Customs Post” by Henri Rousseau
- “The Theater Box” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
- “The Card Players” by Paul Cézanne
- “Seated Nude” by Amedeo Modigliani
Cézanne | Courtauld Impressionists
Paul Cézanne Quotes
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“A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.”
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“There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.”
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“Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.”
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“The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.”
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“We live in a rainbow of chaos.”
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“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.”
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“The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read.”
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“Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.”
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“Art is a harmony parallel with nature.”
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“Genius is the ability to renew one’s emotions in daily experience.”
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“The world doesn’t understand me, and I don’t understand the world, that’s why I’ve withdrawn from it.”
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“I am old and ill, and I have sworn to die painting.”
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“When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also.”
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“Art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all.”
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“I must be more sensible and realize that at my age, illusions are hardly permitted, and they will always destroy me.”
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“Art is a harmony parallel with nature.”
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“When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God-made object, like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.”
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“Keep good company – that is, go to the Louvre.”
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Cézanne’s Card Players
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“We live in a rainbow of chaos.”
– Paul Cézanne
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Photo Credit: Paul Cézanne [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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