The Card Players

The museum in Aix-en-Provence where Cézanne grew up, the Musée Granet, showed a 17th-century picture of card players by Mathieu Le Nain, and he probably knew it well. Card games were an old subject, usually painted as noisy tavern scenes with drink and cheating. Around 1890, at the Jas de Bouffan, his family's estate outside Aix, Cézanne took the theme over with local farmhands as models, some of them men who worked on the estate. His players say nothing and barely move. This canvas belongs to a series of five and is one of only two with more than two figures. Scholars long assumed he began with the big versions and pared them down. X-rays and infrared scans of this picture then found tentative pencil underdrawing, which suggests it came before the larger version now at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Unlike in that picture, every man at this table keeps his hat on.