The Card Players

Two farm workers face each other over a small wooden table, deep in a game of cards. One wears a dark top hat and puffs on a pipe, the other a lighter jacket and softer hat, and between them stands a single bottle. Paul Cézanne painted this scene in the 1890s using laborers from his native region in the south of France as his models. He was drawn to their quiet seriousness, and he liked the subject so much that he made several versions of it, some large and some small.

Rather than aiming for perfect, photographic detail, Cézanne built these men out of chunky blocks of color, giving them a solid, almost carved feeling. Everything in the picture holds steady, with the bottle in the center working like a still point that keeps the whole thing in balance. This blocky, structured way of painting turned out to matter a great deal, and artists like Picasso pointed to Cézanne as a major inspiration for the modern art that followed. A simple game between two ordinary men ended up nudging painting in a brand new direction, and works from this series now rank among the most expensive ever sold.