The Poker Game

The card players are family. According to the Musée d'Orsay, they include Vallotton's wife Gabrielle, her mother and her uncle. Gabrielle was the daughter of the Paris art dealer Alexandre Bernheim, and after the couple married in early 1899 her brothers, Josse and Gaston, began showing his work in their gallery. For a few years he painted this new household again and again. Here, though, the relatives are pushed to the far end of a dim room, bent over their cards. Almost all of the foreground belongs to an empty oval table in deep polished red, with a tall lamp on it whose shade is out of all proportion to the people behind. The museum's commentary dwells on exactly that distance. The lamp's light falls on the tabletop as one pale, blurred patch.