Cézanne’s Wine Bottles Part 3
In the third version of Cézanne’s “The Card Players” series, the one now on view at the Musée d’Orsay, human figures enter the world that formerly belonged solely to the inanimate objects of drinking and eating.
But in this version of genre painting, Cézanne once again gives primacy to the wine bottle. Sitting there on the same table where the cards are dealt and the two players contemplate their hands (their fates) is the volume of grape. It is modest but also grand in its potential to transform the spirit of the human play.
Note the activity of the card players; they are solemn in their concentration, intense in their dryness. The bottle awaits their consumption. Cézanne shows us even more than a merely impressionist moment would capture. Right there, in between the card players, the wine bottle balances their countenances. The man on the left wears a hat with the brim bent down, the man on the left wears a fisherman’s hat with the brim bent up. Cézanne’s viewing a café or bar near a wharf, it seems, and the bottle seems to take on new significance.
In this version of “The Card Players,” Cézanne gives the wine bottle the anchored dependability of a buoy. This very great painting has a supremely balanced composition, but its elements suggest an inebriated wobble. It tilts and yet the wine bottle stands steady. If one player seems to slide off the canvas on a tide, the other’s distance from the bottle stresses equilibrium.
Cézanne demonstrates his sense of humor with the painting’s exacting and minute detail—it’s not the faces of the players or the faces on their cards: it’s the cork in the wine bottle. This small but very significant figure makes the painting’s familiar objects funny. The cork is at the center, doing as it would do in the sea or in a wine drinker’s imagination: It floats.
