The Card Players: A Painting by Paul Cezanne

One of the artist’s portrayals of peasant life in late 19th-century France

Paul Cezanne (1839–1906) painted a number of pictures in the 1890s that portrayed peasants who lived in or near his home town of Aix-en-Provence in southern France. “The Card Players” (completed in 1895) was one of the more ambitious of these. It can be seen at the Courtauld Gallery in London.

Cezanne’s preoccupation in this painting was the balance of colours and light-and-shade. Every area of the canvas is an interplay of a myriad of tones, subtly graded into each other. For the most part, the colour is simply and broadly applied but the men’s faces are modelled with crisp, delicate brush-strokes.

There are problems with the composition of this painting. The table leg on the left appears to be shorter than that on the right, for example, and one has to wonder at exactly how tall the player on the left must be, given the point to which his knees extend under the table. At least seven feet, one imagines!

These details were the result of Cezanne’s concentration on the relationships of tone and colour at the expense of accurate representation, which was typical of the artist. Cezanne’s friends were known to point out such oddities to him, but he just laughed them off.