Paul Cézanne

This drawing belongs to a series depicting card players, using men from the artist’s hometown as models. During the early 1890s, Cézanne made drawings from his own paintings on this subject, modifying and strengthening their compositions. Here, the man’s substantial form is conveyed almost entirely with spare, loosely sketched graphite lines. Light touches of watercolor highlight the blue of his smock and his ruddy cheeks, in contrast to the white expanse of the paper. The artist’s choice to focus on this man, excluding his partners in the game, underscores the subject’s intense and introspective focus.

Cézanne made five paintings depicting card players in the early 1890s, using peasants in the region of Aix-en-Provence as models. He made drawings after his own paintings between versions in order to strengthen and make adjustments to his compositions. The RISD sheet was likely copied after the oil painting now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In the drawing, Cézanne simplified the human form, eliminating unnecessary or complicating details. The viewer is forced to read the areas of untouched paper as lighted, volumetric form.

Cézanne and Degas had met by the late 1860s in Paris at the Café Guerbois, where they engaged in lively, if sometimes antagonistic, discussions. They both worked outside mainstream Impressionism, and they were among the most knowledgeable about art history and the most well read of their artists’ group. More so than most of their colleagues, they gave prominence to drawing: life drawing, copying, and studies for paintings. This drawing, after a figure in Cézanne’s painting The Card Players, ca. 1890-92 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), was made in preparation for another version of the subject. As a modern portrait, it would have had particular appeal for Degas.

Their mutual regard was long-standing. Degas acquired one of the first collections of Cézanne’s work, most of it just after the first Cézanne retrospective exhibition, organized by Ambroise Vollard in 1895. At this very time, Cézanne was copying a work by Degas.