Cardplayers

In the serene and monumental paintings of Paul Cezanne, painstaking genius of France's 19th century renaissance, modern art was born in arduous travail. A man obsessed by ideas he could see but could convey to canvas only through unremitting labor, Cezanne gave to art something of almost every important development it has known in the last 50 years. Yet he himself was rarely satisfied with what he did. His work was made even more difficult by his mistrust of people; he had a dreadful time with models, of whom he demanded a stonelike immobility and endless sittings. But in the cafes of his native city, Aix-en-Provence, he found some whom he could paint in relative peace: the cardplayers who sat for hours immersed in their game. He did four paintings and innumerable sketches of them, which are considered among the greatest of his work, with the dignity, the repose and yet the intensity of life which he always sought—a quality which gave to people the stillness of nature, andto nature the passions of the human soul.

ILLUSTRATION

THE LOUVRE, PARIS

ILLUSTRATION

MUSEUM OF ART, RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN