Le joueur de cartes (The Cardplayer)

In the early 1890s Cézanne took on a subject that he worked at for years, men playing cards. His models were farm workers from the Jas de Bouffan, the family estate just outside Aix-en-Provence, and before painting the finished scenes he studied the players one at a time. That amount of preparation was unusual for him. The online catalogue of his paintings identifies this sitter as Paulin Paulet, a gardener on the estate. He sits alone here, in his hat and brown jacket, leaning over the corner of a table. The canvas passed from the dealer Ambroise Vollard to collectors in Berlin and New York, and in 1997 the Berlin-born dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen gave it to the Musée d'Orsay. In 2010 and 2011 it travelled to London and New York for the first exhibition devoted to the Card Players, where it hung beside the finished versions it helped to prepare.