An Analysis of Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players
The Card Players by Paul Cézanne
Cataloging
Title: The Card Players
Artist: Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Paul Cézanne was born into a bourgeois family. His father bought a mansion where Cézanne came into contact with nature while working far from the city. Cézanne’s journey as a painter began in Aix, at a drawing school where the benchmark was the work of David. His early works were copies of studies and natural scenes. He established a friendship with Emile Zola, thanks to whom he learned about naturalism and Roman literature. Although his father wanted him to study law, Cézanne moved to Paris at 22 and began to paint.
At the Académie Suisse, Cézanne met Camille Pissarro, Armand Guillaumin, Claude Monet, and a few others. He often visited the Louvre. The Parisian art scene seemed to expect great things from him. However, the suspense of the entrance examination at the School of Fine Arts drove Cézanne back to Aix to work with his father. His artistic breakthrough took place between 1864 and 1870.
Date: 1890-1892
Style: Post-Impressionism
Museum: Musée d’Orsay (Paris)
Technique: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 0.47 x 0.57 m
Theme and Description
The picture shows two men seated on either side of a table, playing cards in a tavern. The two figures display contrasting demeanors. On the left, dimly lit, sits a man with a rigid body. On the right, a brighter, more vivid figure. Cézanne used cylindrical forms for the player on the left and undulating forms for the player on the right. The colors are contrasting, white for the left and gray for the right.
Cézanne was primarily interested in the pictorial aspects of painting, but the theme of this picture relates it to the everyday life depicted by realist painters, especially Courbet. In 1860, Honoré Daumier painted chess players. Cézanne was interested in the subject of card players, which had already been treated by the Le Nain brothers and Georges de la Tour, and he painted five paintings with this subject.
Plastic Elements
This is an oil painting with short brushstrokes of different shades, which Cézanne used to shape the volume of people and objects. The painting is dominated by a warm palette. The character on the left wears a jacket with predominant brown tones and trousers dominated by light ocher, while the opposite occurs in the character on the right. In this work, the architectural design of the composition is best detected in elements such as the sleeves of the jacket or the tablecloth.
Cézanne commented in 1904 that nature should be treated according to the cylinder, sphere, and cone, all within the perspective. The drawing is present, with sturdy lines of dark tones. Note the acute angles of the arms folded on the horizontal table and the cylindrical hats. The strokes of color represent a set of complementary colors, with brushstrokes commonly seen in ocher and yellow lilies.
It has been said that in some parts of the picture, such as the head of”Père Alexandre” there is a lack of contour lines, so that the shape has been constructed from a mosaic of strokes.
Composition
The idea of painting a couple of players came to Cézanne in his hometown. He left a larger composition with five characters (Barnes Foundation), then one with four (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and finally, made three versions with a couple (Musée d’Orsay).
The number of figures and the presence of other elements favor a symmetrical composition, whose center line is marked by the line of light reflected in the wine bottle. The painter was more interested in the composition of his paintings than in his figures. The arrangement of the characters at the table with a bottle results in a pyramidal composition. The version at the Courtauld Institute has a larger format (0.60 x 0.73 m) compared to the Musée d’Orsay version (0.47 x 0.57 m). On the left, one recognizes Père Alexandre, Cézanne’s gardener. The figure on the right is the same farmer in both versions.
Style
After Impressionism, two styles developed: Neo-Impressionism, which tried to bring Impressionist ideas to their ultimate conclusion, and Post-Impressionism, which would break new ground. Cézanne is considered a Post-Impressionist painter. The Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro introduced Cézanne to the aesthetics of Impressionism and painting outdoors. In the summer of 1908, Georges Braque painted landscapes and still lifes at Cézanne’s home in Pond, trying to implement Cézanne’s proposals to define objects from geometric shapes.
Notes on the Context of the Painter and His Work
‘s criticism takes a long time to become aware of the great talent of Cezanne, some were interested in his work in the 1890s. The painting was bought by his dealer Ambroise Vollard, step by different people to get into the hands of Count Isaac de Camondo. It follows that the work of Impressionist and Càzanne part will be the starting point of Analytical Cubism.