Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source
The Card Players
Paul Cézanne · Post-Impressionism & Neo-Impressionism
- Artist
- Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)
- Date
- c. 1892–1896
- Dimensions
- 60 x 73 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Courtauld Gallery, London, United Kingdom
The Card Players shows two Provençal peasants facing each other across a small table, absorbed in a game of cards. A wine bottle stands between them. This is one of five paintings Cézanne made on the theme in the 1890s.
A closer look
The two men, one smoking a pipe, sit in perfect stillness; neither speaks nor looks up. Cézanne was not interested in the drama of the game but in the solid forms of the figures, their hats, coats and arms, and in the balance of the composition, divided by the bottle like a mirror. The colours are earthy browns, blues and ochres, applied in small, structured patches. The farmhands, who worked on Cézanne’s family estate near Aix-en-Provence, take on the monumental calm of figures in a classical painting.
History of the painting
This version of The Card Players was bought by the textile industrialist Samuel Courtauld, who in the 1920s assembled one of the finest collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting in Britain. In 1932 he gave his collection to found the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the painting now hangs in the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House, together with other masterpieces he bought, such as Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
