A Study for the Card Players
1890–92
Medium
Watercolor with graphite on beige wove paper
Dimensions
36.2 × 48.5 cm (14 5/16 × 19 1/8 in.)
Classification
watercolor
Department
Prints and Drawings
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
133136
Art Historical Context
Paul Cézanne's *A Study for the Card* (1890–92) offers a captivating glimpse into the artist's late-career obsession with everyday Provençal life. Created during a pivotal period when Cézanne was refining his Post-Impressionist vision, preparatory work draws from his renowned series of oil paintings depicting humble peasants engrossed in a card game. These compositions, painted in the artist's native Aix-en-Provence, capture the dignity and timelessness of rural French existence, stripping away narrative drama to emphasize form, color, and spatial relationships. Rendered in watercolor with gr...
About the Artist
Paul Cezanne · 1839–1906
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), born in Aix-en-Provence to a prosperous banker father, Louis-Auguste, and mother Anne-Elisabeth-Honorine Aubert, grew up in a bourgeois family that later acquired the Jas de Bouffan estate, where he painted his earliest murals. As a youth, he formed the inseparable trio "Les Trois Inséparables" with schoolmates Émile Zola and Baptistin Baille. Despite his father's wishes ...