The Card Players

Cézanne worked on the theme of card players for years, in five paintings and many studies, and this is one of the smallest and most concentrated. Look at how the two figures mirror each other, arms making a bridge over the table, and how the vertical bottle splits the picture into two calm halves. The colours are held to a low warm harmony of ochres, browns and dull blues, with the tablecloth a slab of yellow. The paint is laid in short parallel strokes that build the forms like masonry, and the outlines are repeated and adjusted rather than fixed. This way of constructing a picture, from patches of colour and weight rather than from drawing, is what the Cubists and Matisse learned from him.

The painting came to the national collection in 1969 through the estate of the couturier Jacques Doucet and hangs in the Cézanne gallery at Orsay. Its sister versions are in London, New York, Philadelphia and a private collection; one of them was sold in 2011 for a price that made it, for a time, the most expensive painting ever bought. Notice the pipe smoker's hat, a simple dark shape that anchors the whole left side, and the way the table edge is not quite straight, a deliberate wobble that keeps the picture breathing.

Did You Know? The gardener Paulin Paulet, who posed for the man on the right, was paid by Cézanne in small sums and sat for several of the card player pictures.