THE CARD PLAYERS:

The Card Players is a series of oil paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cezanne. Painted during Cezanne's final period in the early 1890s, there are five paintings in the series. The versions vary in size, the number of players, and the setting in which the game takes place.

Cezanne also completed numerous drawings and studies in preparation for The Card Players series. One version of The Card Players was sold in 2011 to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price variously estimated at between $250 million. It was thought to be sold to the Davis family out of Florida in the United States for an estimated $225 million usd ($278.4 million today). This is the Third costliest painting after Interchange.

While there are, in total, five paintings of card players by Cezanne, the final three works were similar in composition and number of players (two), causing them to sometimes be grouped together as one version. The largest version, painted between the years 1890 to 1892, is the most complex, with five figures on a 134.6 x 180.3cm (53 * 71 in) canvas. It features three card players at the forefront, seated in a semi-circle at a table, with two spectators behind. The painting is owned and displayed by the Barnes Foundation museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

EXHIBITIONS

In 2010, a joint exhibition was organized by the Courtauld Gallery in London and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to display The Card Players paintings.The exhibition ran in London from 21 October 2010 to 16 January 2011 and in New York from 9 February 2011 to 8 May 2011.

It was described as the first exhibition devoted to the series as well as the largest collection of Cezanne's Card Players paintings to ever be exhibited together.The exhibition included the paintings owned by the Courtauld, Metropolitan, and Musee d'Orsay. The versions at the Barnes Foundation and in a private collection were displayed as prints, due to the Barnes policy of not lending and the private collector declining to release the work. The mini-series of men smoking pipes sometimes referred to as The Smokers was also included with over a dozen other studies and sketches, however a legal dispute also prevented the Hermitage Museum's version of Man with a Pipe from traveling to New York.

THE CARD PLAYERS

STUDIES AND SKETCHES:

Cezanne created a substantial number of studies and preparatory drawings for The Card Players series. While it had long been believed he began the series with the largest paintings and subsequently worked smaller, 21st-century x-rays of the paintings as well as further analysis of preparatory sketches and studies has led some scholars to believe Cezanne used both the studies and the smaller versions of The Card Players to prepare for the larger canvases.

Over a dozen initial sketches and painted studies of local farmworkers were made by Cezanne in preparation for the final paintings. It has been speculated his models sat for the studies rather than the finished works themselves, and the painter possibly sketched preliminary work in an Aix cafe.

Some of the studies have been well regarded as stand-alone works of their own volition, particularly the accompaniment piece Man with a Pipe, displayed alongside The Card Players at the Courtauld Gallery in London.