The Card Players

The Card Players is a series of oil paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne. Painted during Cézanne's final period in the early 1890s, the series consists of five paintings depicting peasants immersed in smoking and playing cards. The versions are of varying sizes, the largest being 134.6 x 180.3 cm, and are housed in different museums around the world.

The paintings are celebrated for their depiction of the intense focus and stillness of the players. Cézanne's use of color, composition, and perspective was innovative for his time and contributed significantly to the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic inquiry, Cubism. Each painting shows men seated at a table, playing cards. The players are depicted with a heavy, sculptural solidity, and their concentrated silence is almost palpable.

The most famous of the series is housed in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and features three card players in a well-lit interior, while another version, which features two players, is part of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Other versions can be found in the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and a private collection.

The series is notable for the way in which Cézanne distills the essence of his subjects. He reduces the figures and the space around them to simple, geometric forms – a technique that would later influence the development of Cubism. The Card Players series is often interpreted as a reflection on human life, particularly the themes of isolation, concentration, and the passage of time.

Cézanne's Card Players were not created for commercial success but rather for the artist's own exploration of thematic and formal concerns. This is evident in the meticulous care he took with the composition and the fact that the series was not widely known until after his death.

The Card Players series has been the subject of numerous art historical studies and is considered one of Cézanne's masterpieces. It exemplifies the artist's contribution to the development of modern art and continues to influence artists and captivate audiences today.