This version of the card players by Paul Cézanne is one of the great highlights
of The Courtauld's Cézanne collection. It forms part of a series of five paintings
depicting peasant card players that Cézanne worked on at the beginning of
the 1890s. It was not a subject that he had ever depicted before and it proved
to be a major preoccupation of his throughout much of that decade.
This painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York seems to be the first
version of the card player theme that Cézanne painted. It shows four figures
arranged around a farmhouse table. But unlike card playing scenes from the art
of the past, Cézanne eliminates all anecdotal detail. The figures seem locked
in their own world not engaging with each other.
There're no drinks on the table, this isn't a rowdy tavern scene as one might
expect from, for example, Dutch genre painting of similar subjects. Instead
Cézanne presents a monumental composition, a composition which is about
these figures locked in contemplation. And there is for Cézanne I think a sense
in which the local peasants of Aix-en-Provence provided the human equivalent
of the solid monumentality of the landscape around that area that he also
painted so much. The Card Player series was a major project for Cézanne and
unusually for the artist he produced a large body of preparatory works for the
scenes. He seems not to have posed his peasants as a group around a table and
sketched them in that way but rather he brought the peasants into his studio
individually and studied them in great detail as single figures. And this
drawing from Rhode Island Museum really captures that sense of intense study.
It's done mainly in pencil with just a few touches of blue watercolor. And the
figure would appear on the right hand side
in the Metropolitan version of the canvas. Cézanne also, and again rarely
for this artist, produced a group of oil studies for the works, trying to
establish the forms and character of his card playing peasants. And this little
painting from Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts is for the central
figure who would anchor the composition of the larger Card Player pictures. Having
produced his Card Player scenes showing four and five peasants arranged around a
table Cézanne then embarked upon a group of three pictures which refine that
composition to just two figures, facing each other across a wooden table.
For at least the last 50 years it has been thought that Cézanne worked on the
biggest paintings first and then refined the composition in scale to arrive at
the smallest picture, which is this one here from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
However, recent technical research conducted at The Courtauld Institute of Art
in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
has shown that in fact Cézanne worked in the opposite way, that he started with
the smaller paintings exploring the composition and then scaled up in size
until he arrived at the largest and most monumental expression of his subject.
We've looked at these pictures using x-ray and infrared light and that has
shown the underdrawing that's visible beneath the surface of the paint.
This gives us very clear evidence that he was working the composition out in the
smaller paintings and then by the time he gets to the larger works his technique
is more fluid and the composition comes to him more easily. In repeating this
same composition no less than three times Cézanne seems to have been seeking
to refine and monumentalise his Card Player composition - to effectively
try and express this contemplative attitude of these two men, locked in the
age-old ritual of their game. The early Cézanne critic Roger Fry said that the
pictures felt like they were something that had found their center of gravity
and could never be moved.