Introduction: French painter Paul Cezanne (1839
- 1906) is considered by many as the father of modem art, with
oil painting being his primary medium. His new approach to space
and his rejection of conventional perspective rules brought about
a paradigm shift in art.
However, as are most radical geniuses, Cezanne did not receive
recognition until his last years.
Background: Cezanne came from an upper middle
class family in Aix-en-Provence where he lived a comfortable childhood.
Having overcome his own doubts and resistance from his authoritarian
father, Cezanne studied painting in Paris.
His persistent copies of the Old Masters in
Louvre and in books influenced his early expressive pieces, which
articulate his own fears and passions. Restricted to high contrasts
and dark colours, the expressionistic paintings depicted scenes
of violence and sexuality such as murder, abduction and temptation.
To escape drafting into the army in 1939, Cezanne
moved to the small fishing village ofL'Estaque where he started
to concentrate on painting nature.
In 1972, along with Hortense Fiquet and their
son Paul, he started work in Pontoise alongside Camille Pissaro,
one of the early Impressionists.
As a result of his encounter with the Impressionists, Cezanne
came to a critical moment of his development. This was when he
adopted brighter colours and the Impressionist "signature"
brushstroke of graduated colour placed closely together. The result
is a realistic depiction of the landscapes with the shimmering
effects created by the, shower of sunlight.
Now that he was introduced to painting in the
open and to the precise observation of nature, he worked on developing
his technique of landscape painting, studying the countryside
of Aix-en_Provence, L'Estaque and Paris. Eventually, colour assumed
a central role in his composition and he was determined to create
harmonious paintings. Cezanne was determined to create space and
perspective by means of planes of colour.
In innumerable studies of apples, he tried to
model them without using lines, painting the apple as he saw it,
a collection of various colour tones. He was obsessed with form
over content, that is, whether the subject was bathers or fruits,
he focused on their colour tones and their harmony with the rest
of the composition rather than define their features. During the
last stage of his development,
Cezanne increasingly reduced the individual components
of his landscapes to simple shapes. Moreover, he reduced the contrast
between the natural forms portrayed by the evenness of technique
and brush strokes. Such paintings paved the way for later artists
such as the cubists and the Fauves.
The Card Players
This is a painting of a scene from everyday life - two card players,
two different atmospheres. The

1893 - 1896, Oil on Canvas 47.5 x 57
cm Paris, Musee d'Orsay |
player on the left is relaxed, leaning back on
his chair and smoking a cigarette; his partner, on the other hand,
is hunched forward and more absorbed in the game. One hat is firm
and composed, with a regular brim, while the other is irregular,
soft and
battered. The first has a heavy body compared to the head yet
this oddly makes he seem further away from the artist even though
the two bodies have the same weight. One pair of arms is parallel
and the other is converging. All these bring out the two players
from the painting without compromising the integrity of the other
subjects. The better-illuminated, bulkier and more muscular player
on the right is carefully placed off picture to achieve balance;
the left player is more completely in the picture whereas the
other is marginal. Without using linear perspective, a sense of
depth and space is achieved by three stages of depth: - the players
in the foreground, the window in middle and the dark exterior
at the
back. The darkness out of the window and the artificial overhead
lighting from the reflection