Description
The Card Players – Cézanne’s most monumental everyday scene
The Card Players is Paul Cézanne’s best known series and one of the central subjects of Post-Impressionism. The version you see here hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and shows four figures: three men at the table and a fourth who stands against the wall with a pipe in his mouth. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this quiet, almost solemn scene into your home, painted in oil on canvas with all the restrained tones of the original.
A series of five canvases, and a scene slowly emptied
Cézanne took up the subject in the early 1890s and painted it five times over the following years. The series reads as a slow subtraction: the largest canvas, in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, has five figures including a boy watching the game; the New York version has four; and the last three canvases – in the Courtauld in London, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and a private collection – are down to two players, face to face. Cézanne was not after a story but a balance: with every version he removed something that would explain the scene, until nothing was left but concentration.
The models were field workers, not players
The men at the table are not professional models but farm labourers from around Aix-en-Provence; some of them worked on the Jas de Bouffan estate belonging to Cézanne’s family. The painter portrayed them neither mockingly nor picturesquely, as genre painting usually did, but with a seriousness until then reserved for portraits of the middle class. Nobody is winning, nobody is cheating, there is no money on the table – we see only two hands of cards and the silence between them. Art historians often cite as a prompt the card players of the Le Nain brothers from the 17th century, which Cézanne could have seen in the museum in Aix; that is a reading repeated in the literature, not a statement by the painter himself.
What you see on the canvas
The scene is built from verticals and diagonals: the upright figure by the wall, the pipe rack, the heavy ochre curtain on the right. Cézanne lays colour in planes that never merge into a smooth surface but stay visible as separate strokes – which is precisely why he was regarded as the father of modern painting. The original is painted in oil on canvas, measures 65.4 × 81.9 cm and has been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1960 as the bequest of Stephen C. Clark (inv. no. 61.101.1). It was made between 1890 and 1892.
How the canvas reached New York
The New York version came to the Metropolitan in 1960 as the bequest of the collector Stephen C. Clark. American collections took an unusually early interest in Cézanne, and the painter Mary Cassatt did much to bring that about: as adviser to the collector Louisine Havemeyer she steered American buyers towards the French modernists at a time when they were still thought questionable in Paris. On her death in 1929 Havemeyer left the Metropolitan 142 paintings – Cézannes among them – and so laid the foundation on which the New York collection of Post-Impressionism still rests.
A record price that belongs to another canvas in the series
The Card Players series is also known for one of the highest prices in the history of the art market: in 2011 the Qatari royal family bought the private two-player version from the heirs of the Greek shipping magnate George Embiricos. The price was never officially confirmed – estimates range between 250 and 320 million dollars. It is worth knowing that this concerns another canvas from the series, not the New York one; but it was that sale that made the subject famous worldwide.
How Cézanne reaches your wall
This scene is not a print but a genuine hand-painted painting on canvas, painted for you by an experienced artist. It comes in ten sizes, and if a particular wall asks for different proportions we paint it to your measurements. The restrained browns and blues carry even a smaller room. You can choose among the frames in our range – a realistic 3D preview in our app shows you how it will look before you decide. Among our reproductions of famous paintings you will find Cézanne’s other figure subjects as well: The Card Players (Courtauld), Boy in a Red Waistcoat and Mardi Gras (Fastnacht).
- Subject: The Card Players, Paul Cézanne, 1890–1892, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: the series runs to five canvases – from five figures at the Barnes down to only two players in the last three
