The Card Players

Cézanne painted his card players in the 1890s at the Jas de Bouffan, the family estate outside Aix, and the men who sat for him were farmhands from the place, paid to hold a pose for hours. The subject was an old one. In the Musée Granet, the town museum in Aix, hangs a 17th-century Card Players by the Le Nain brothers, full of tavern incident, and Cézanne knew it well. In his version there is no stake on the table, no cheat and no onlooker. Two men in working clothes lean over their hands. This is the smallest of the five canvases in the series and generally taken to be the last of them. It came into the French national collections in 1911, five years after his death, with the bequest of the banker Isaac de Camondo.