The Card Players

Paul Cézanne painted The Card Players in the early 1890s as one of a series of scenes of peasant life in his native Provence. Two men sit absorbed in their game, their bodies bent toward the table, a wine bottle standing between them like a still center of gravity. Cézanne reduced the scene to its essentials — simplified forms, muted color, and a gravity that dignifies the ordinary moment. The largest of the series, a five-figure composition, is in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia; this version in the Musée d’Orsay is among the most admired of his later works.