Five canvases, the same table, and fewer men at it each time. The earlier ones have the players plus somebody standing at their shoulder. By the last, everyone else has gone: two men, their cards and a bottle in the middle. Most painters add things. He took them away.
The men at the table
They were not professional models. Cézanne worked at the Jas de Bouffan, the family place outside Aix, and the men who sat for him were the farm workers on it. One was an old gardener the household called père Alexandre. Another was Paulin Paulet, who sat for three separate portraits and was paid five francs for posing.
The version in the Metropolitan Museum has three of them playing with their hats on and a fourth standing behind to watch, a heavy yellow curtain at the left and a blue wall behind. It is 65 centimetres by 82. Nothing in the room is grand and nobody in it is comic, which was the unusual part: card players had been a subject for cheats and fools since Caravaggio, and these ones are only concentrating.
What he removed
There is no money on the table. Dutch and French painters of this subject normally showed the stakes, because the stakes are the story, and here the game is being played for nothing visible at all. Across the five canvases the table narrows, the onlookers leave, and the objects go until a single wine bottle is left standing in the middle.
He began around 1891 and stayed with it for several years, working up drawings, watercolours and oil studies of the individual men first, and the Metropolitan's curators describe him still adjusting the poses and positions long after the conception was settled. The Courtauld in London and the Musée d'Orsay hold two-player versions; the biggest and most crowded is at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Put them in order and you can watch a room empty.
The one that is not in a museum
The fifth stayed private. It belonged to the Greek shipowner George Embiricos, who held it for decades and did not lend it out. In 2011 it went to Qatar. Neither side published a figure, and the number that went round the press was more than 250 million dollars, which at the time was more than anyone had paid for a painting.
So the series now sits at both ends of the art world at once: four canvases in public galleries in London, Paris, New York and Philadelphia, where a ticket puts you in front of them, and one that very few people have ever stood in front of at all. The subject, in every case, is two farm workers deciding what to put down next.
He started with a crowd and ended with two men and a bottle. Nothing left on the table but the game.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.