Which French painter created 'The Card Players' series?

Paul Cézanne created The Card Players series.

Cézanne painted the series during his mature period in the early 1890s, producing five oil paintings rather than one single definitive canvas. Each version depicts Provençal farmworkers quietly absorbed in a card game. The number of figures, scale, composition, and degree of detail change from painting to painting, but all emphasize stillness and concentration.

The series adapts a subject familiar from seventeenth-century Dutch and French genre painting. Earlier card-playing scenes often showed noisy taverns, drinking, gambling, and comic drama. Cézanne removed most of that narrative activity, turning the players into monumental, almost sculptural forms. His models included local workers connected with his family estate, the Jas de Bouffan.

The five paintings are held by institutions including the Barnes Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Courtauld Gallery, with one in a private collection. The series is frequently discussed as a bridge between Impressionism and modern art.