The Card Players

Two peasants sit across a small table, utterly absorbed in their game of cards, their solid forms leaning toward each other in mirrored balance, a bottle marking the center between them. Cezanne painted several versions of card players using local farmhands as models, stripping the old genre of anecdote to build a composition of monumental stillness and structure. Now in the Musee d'Orsay, the Card Players is among his most celebrated figure works - quiet, grave, and architectural, two ordinary men playing cards raised to the timeless weight and order of a classical composition.