Why Playing Cards Matters
Les Joueurs de Carte (The Card Players), Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Ambrose Bierce famously defined cribbage as “A substitute for conversation among those to whom nature has denied ideas.” Admittedly, this is from his achingly funny satirical work, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary. But you don’t have to be a fan of cribbage to consider this a bit unfair. Both to card games generally and the people who play them.
After all, card games provide entertainment and intellectual stimulation. They help us unwind. And they are, generally, social activities that bring us a range of emotional and mental benefits.
They’ve been with us for a long time. The first playing cards appeared in 9th century China. They eventually spread to Europe in the 14th century as trading links developed. And were standardised by the French in the 15th century, who produced the 52-card deck and the four suits, spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds, familiar to us today.
Most games are folk games, with rules that have been passed down, and adapted, from generation to generation. Card-playing is deeply embedded in our society. It’s no surprise, then, that they have featured in artworks through the course of history.
To my mind, one of the finest depictions of card-playing in art is Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players. Painted in the early 1890s, this is actually a series of five paintings depicting two or more Provençal peasants quietly smoking their pipes and playing cards. Absolutely locked in contemplation of their game, the paintings are amongst Cézanne’s most powerful works.
There’s something timeless about these farmworkers, and a stillness to the paintings which draws you inexorably into their orbit. It’s a world away from the drunken, unruly peasants that characterised Dutch 17th-century genre painting or the symbolism evident in Baroque and Rococo paintings on this subject. As Cézanne said, the painter “unfolds…that which has not yet been said; he translates it into absolute terms of painting – something other than reality.”
The art critic Roger Fry, who coined the term ‘Post-Impressionism’, described Cezanne's card players as having, “a monumental sense of gravity and resistance - of something that has found its centre and can never be moved”.
There is no excitement or drama in the paintings. Apart from the wine bottle, the table is bare. They are completely absorbed in the shared social space of the game and the concentration it requires. At ease with each other and their surroundings.
This sense of harmony is reinforced by the symmetry provided by the unity of opposites evident in the different clothing and postures of the players and the contrasting hues of the cards they hold. In each of the two-player paintings, the wine bottle sits in the middle of the table, offering both a demarcation between the two players as well symbolising the unity of the story depicted.
Cézanne remarked that “Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.” He was being modest. The Card Players showed he’d cracked it. And the paintings still resonate with people today precisely because they demonstrate the power of participation in a sociable pastime that offers such a dramatic contrast to the soulless world we inhabit.