Paul Cezanne - The Card Players Ceramic Tile

The Card Players (Les Joueurs de cartes), painted between 1890 and 1892 in oil on canvas by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne, presents three Provençal farm workers absorbed in a game of cards around a plain wooden table, while two figures watch from behind. The standing man with folded arms and a pipe is known as Père Alexandre, while the young spectator is Léontine Paulet, daughter of Paulin Paulet, one of the gardeners at Cézanne's family estate, the Jas de Bouffan near Aix-en-Provence. This is the largest and most elaborate of the five compositions Cézanne devoted to the subject. The exact order of the five versions remains debated, so it is safer not to present this painting as definitively the first. Cézanne probably drew inspiration from a seventeenth-century card-playing scene attributed to the Le Nain brothers that he knew from the museum in Aix-en-Provence. The series later became one of the artist's most celebrated achievements: a different two-player version sold privately in 2011 for more than $250 million, at the time an unprecedented price for a work of art.