From left to right: Paul Cézanne, The Card Players (1892-96), The Courtauld Gallery; The Card Players (1890-92), The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Card Players (1892-96), Museé d’Orsay.
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London’s Courtauld Gallery has a remarkable talent for organizing small exhibitions based on an iconic item from its permanent collection. It is supplemented with other versions of the work from other galleries, together with preparatory sketches, watercolors, and experiments in oil that the artist used in preparing the finished paintings.They have done it in the past with Manet’s Le déjeuner dans l’atelier and Un bar aux Folies-Bergère. Now it is the turn of Cézanne’s series of paintings from 1892–96, Les joueurs de cartes (“The Card Players”). The Courtauld’s own version is placed alongside that owned by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. A larger variation, with four figures instead of two, from the Metropolitan Museum in New York is on display, and there is a reproduction of the one in the Barnes Foundation collection in Merion, Pennsylvania.
In The Card Players, Cézanne takes a familiar scene from European genre paintings of the lower classes at play, but his treatment is very different from that of his predecessors. There is no rowdiness, drunkenness, puking, or gambling, no moral message and no rollicking humor. He does not give us the idiocy of rural life and its dissipated peasantry or the bleak hardship of van