Paul Cezanne painted The Card Players five times in the 1890s, and the series is famous for how little happens in it: farmhands at a table, a bottle, a hand of cards, no noise. A private sale to the royal family of Qatar, reported in 2012 at about $250 million and then the highest price ever paid for a work of art, carried the name far beyond museums.
The subject was an old one. Tavern gamblers had been painted for centuries, usually shouting. Cezanne took the same scene and made it a picture of concentration, with men bent over a small table and nothing else asking for attention.
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The usual way to tell the story of the series is as a story of subtraction. Cezanne begins with a crowd, then canvas after canvas sends the onlookers away until two men and a bottle remain. The versions at the Met and the Barnes Foundation are the crowded ones, with more than two men at the table. The one in the Musee d'Orsay is among the barest.
The Metropolitan Museum says there is broad consensus that the crowded canvases came first. It then tested that story with X-rays and infrared photography, and its conclusion went the other way. The study found that the smallest paintings came first, which the museum admits runs against most scholarly opinion. None of the five has ever been dated with certainty.
If the Met is right, the silence of the two-man pictures was not where Cezanne ended up. It may be where he began. I think that makes the series stranger than the tidy version, and harder to explain.
Who were the men at the table?
Farmhands from the Jas de Bouffan, the family estate outside Aix-en-Provence. The Courtauld Gallery says the sitters were workers on that farm, among them an old gardener known as le pere Alexandre, and the Musee d'Orsay says the man with the pipe in its canvas has been identified as him.
Another sitter was Paulin Paulet, who according to the Courtauld posed for three portraits of peasants and was paid five francs for the job. The earliest mention of the series dates to 1891, when the writer Paul Alexis visited Cezanne's studio in Aix-en-Provence.
None of the men sat at that table together. The Metropolitan Museum explains that they posed one at a time for sketches, which Cezanne then assembled on the canvas. Each player in the finished picture seems shut inside his own hand. Cezanne knew how differently older painters had staged the same game.
What You'll Discover
What is missing from the table.
Which of the five came first.
Why the record painting stayed hidden.