The Card Players

The Card Players is a series of oil paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne. Painted during Cézanne'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.

Cézanne 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 Cézanne, 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.

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.