The Card Players

In the pictureThree men sit around a table, looking down at the cards in their hands. The man on the left wears a brown jacket and a wide-brimmed hat, the man in the middle a white shirt and a black hat, and the man on the right, in a blue jacket, is half turned away. Behind them a man with a pipe stands and watches the game. An orange curtain hangs on the right, and a pipe rack hangs on the back wall. The colors, brown, blue, white and orange, are laid on in broad planes.

BackgroundThis is one of the five paintings of card players that Cézanne made in the early 1890s, using peasants near Aix-en-Provence as his models. Some versions, like this one, include an onlooker; later he pared the subject down to smaller versions with only two men facing each other (in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and the Courtauld in London, among others). The usual reading is that the subject is not the tension of the game but the balance of forms the figures create.

Puzzle tipThe colors divide among the four men's clothes (brown, white, blue and dark blue-gray), the orange curtain on the right and the table. Fit the man in the white shirt in the middle and the cards on the table first, then sort the figures on either side by the color of their clothes. The back wall is a wide expanse of blue-gray, so fill it using the pipe rack and the outline of the standing man as guides. About 100 pieces suits it well.