Hello and welcome to Barnes Takeout. My name is Nancy Iason and I'm the Barnes Foundation's Gunn Family Chief Curator and I'm very excited because today we're going to look at one of the most important pictures in the Barnes Collection and it's a personal favourite too. It's in the main gallery of the foundation and it's one of the pictures that really welcomes you into the space. If you haven't guessed already it's the card place by Sezanne so it's beneath this wonderful painting by Sezanne which shows a group of models and it's at our level so if you can see where the floor is positioned when we come into the gallery it's almost as if we're invited to take a seat at that vacant side of the table. We see a group of farm workers playing cards they're playing a game called Bezier which was quite popular in the south of France where where these figures are set and really we are if you like human it's a human scale painting we seem to become part of the action and our attention is focused in on the game much as theirs is by a very balanced composition that's as they just draws the eye to the centre of the canvas. And here we have the painting in more detail. Now we know that Sezanne probably made this work in the early 1890s he was born in the south of France in 1839 so he's a mature artist at this stage and for about ten years he seems to have been preoccupied with the theme of card players. It's quite hard to date Sezanne's works because he didn't exhibit them very often he didn't sell them very often so really he was working in the south of France at this point really for himself exploring his own intellectual preoccupations and it's really just thanks to a friend of his who had heard that Sezanne was painting farm labourers that we have this this tentative sense of when the actual work happened. And what can we say about these farm labourers? Well Sezanne had inherited a country estate from his dad his father had passed away and so by this point he's a landowner and the lands have to be worked. So what we see here are people who were employed by Sezanne in that capacity and extra to that he seems to have given them money to pose. How do we know that? Well if we look to this figure on the left he's wearing brown. We know that he is a man called Paulin Poulet. He appears in numerous paintings by Sezanne and it's actually thanks to another figure around the table this little child who just is peering in at the action that we have this evidence. This child was a woman called Liotang Poulet and he can probably guess by that last name that she was the daughter of Poula and she was interviewed in the 1960s so far after this painting was made about that experience and she remembered that Sezanne paid her and her father a few francs just to sit. So we can imagine then that the other people around the table these men in blue in particular were other labourers on the estate. It's quite typical for farm labourers of the 1800s and the early 20th century to wear these kind of outfits in France. And for that reason it's worth thinking that a general viewer in Sezanne's they wouldn't have understood these personal references necessarily. Instead what they would have seen is a picture that seems to test itself against the history of art. The theme of the card players was one that painters had addressed for centuries and centuries and really Sezanne was interested in making work for prosperity, you know, having pictures that tested themselves against the great and the good. It's also worth considering that the theme of figures around a table was one that many artists used to explore the Christian theme of the last supper of Christ and his apostles having that last meal again around a table and the sort of poignancy of that. And although we don't have that subject here we might wonder about the stillness of the scene, the sort of seriousness of this game having those kinds of association. If we look at the central figure we see this wrapped concentration we know that originally Sezanne had painted a hat on this figure and he actually goes back in and changes that you can see the way in which he's reiterated the line around the head he's gone in and described the face and I'm really drawn to the way he puts this touch of yellow at the corner of the eye just at the bridge of the nose. So we are invited to engage with that figure and and to see what he's doing. Now some scholars have also aligned this with a disappearing way of life, a rural life that was in jeopardy and certainly as France came into a new century ways of life were changing people were leaving rural areas like Exome Provence where Sezanne's estate was and where these farmers worked and they were moving to to to metropolitan areas. But at the same time we do see a painting that is is very new it is one of that really signals its its modernity through this extraordinary brushwork you can see Sezanne really using all sorts of colours broken into into this background which one might imagine would be quite still it's anything but there's this vibrancy across the canvas and everything is moving and yet there's a real sort of fixity to the figures and it's something that Sezanne went over time and time again he created at least five major paintings on the theme of color playing hours is one of two multi figure compositions there's there's a smaller version in the Metropolitan Museum and he also made three where there are just pairs of figures playing cards and Barnes fought hard and long to get this painting for his collection it took several years of searching and negotiating and when it did come to the Barnes Foundation in 1925 it became a real highlight of of the Barnes collection it still remains so today I think it's an endlessly fascinating painting and we're looking at a fresh because early next year we're going to publish a catalog of the Sezans in the Barnes Foundation so please watch out for that and in the meantime enjoy this picture it is just so extraordinary and if you're a card player perhaps this will inspire you to take a little extra time out of your day to indulge in that hobby and and as I say just think of the wonder if Sezanne is you do so he's just such a fascinating painter thanks for tuning into Barnes takeout please subscribe to our YouTube channel and if you have any comments please do write them in we're always delighted to know what you think take care and see you tomorrow bye bye