Nobody in this painting is winning, losing or cheating. Two men sit across a table with their cards, and their attention is so complete that the picture seems to stop time. Paul Cézanne painted The Card Players in several versions between about 1890 and 1895, and the series became one of the landmarks of his late work.
He posed farm workers from the Aix-en-Provence area as his models, and he made studies of the individual figures before putting them together. The men are in plain clothes and hats, and their faces are calm and a little heavy. Cards in a bar was a traditional subject for Dutch and French painters, who usually made it a story of vice or trickery. Cézanne leaves out the story and keeps the structure.
The forms are simplified into solid blocks, the colors are laid down in careful patches, and the table and bottle are made as important as the people. Later artists, including Picasso, learned from this way of building a picture out of shapes rather than a scene.
The version in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has five figures. One of the two-player versions is reported to have sold privately in 2011 for a price above 250 million dollars, among the highest ever paid for a painting.
Cézanne's The Card Players appears on our: