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Study for Les joueurs de cartes (The Card Players)
Study for Les joueurs de cartes (The Card Players)
Image © Worcester Art Museum, all rights reserved.

Study for Les joueurs de cartes (The Card Players)

Artist (French, 1839–1906)
Date1890–1892
Mediumoil on canvas
Dimensionscanvas: 32.1 × 35.2 cm (12 5/8 × 13 7/8 in.)
framed: 48.9 × 52.1 × 9.5 cm (19 1/4 × 20 1/2 × 3 3/4 in.)
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineMuseum Purchase
Object number1931.104
Label TextOf all nineteenth-century painters, Cézanne has had the greatest influence on the major movements of modern art, from Cubism to Expressionism. A close contemporary of the leading French Impressionists, he strove to combine the lighter palette of these artists with a firmer rendering of form and space. Cézanne, who "re-created nature" by utilizing color and considerable distortion of form to express the essence of his subjects, often painted the same theme many times. The Worcester canvas, one of a series of paintings depicting men engaged meditatively in a game of cards, is a study for a larger work consisting of three cardplayers (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Working with small brushstrokes, Cézanne built up a complex organization of planes of color that define form and space. The result is a sense of monumentality even in this simple subject.ProvenanceAmbrose Vollard, Paris, 1898; Paul Guillaume, Paris, ?; Marie Harriman Gallery, New York, NY; purchased by the museum, 1931.
On View
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