Card Players exhibition in New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is displaying an exhibition of the works by Paul Cézanne entitled The Card Players, 1890-92.

Paul Cézanne’s famous paintings of peasant card players and pipe smokers have long been considered to be among his most iconic and powerful works. This landmark exhibition, organised by The Courtauld Gallery in London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is the first to focus on this group of masterpieces.

Described by Cézanne’s early biographer, Gustav Coquiot, as being “equal to the most beautiful works of art in the world”, this is a unique opportunity to enjoy these remarkable paintings in unprecedented depth. The exhibition brings together the most comprehensive group of these works ever staged, including three of the Card Players paintings, five of the most outstanding peasant portraits and the majority of the exquisite preparatory drawings, watercolours and oil studies.

Cézanne’s Card Players stand alongside his Bathers series as the most ambitious and complex figurative works of his career.

The first mention of the Card Players series comes in 1891 when the writer Paul Alexis visited Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence and found the artist painting a local peasant from the farm on his estate, the Jas de Bouffan. A number of different farm workers came to sit for him over the years, often smoking their clay pipes. They included an old gardener known as le père Alexandre and Paulin Paulet, who posed for the three pesant portraits, a task for which he was paid five francs. For most nineteenth-century viewers his technique would have appeared as coarse as his peasant subject matter but the Card Players would prove an inspiration to later generations of avant-garde artists.