Figures Built from Spheres, Cylinders, and Cones: Cézanne's The Card Players

Cézanne painted several works on the theme of card players, and this is the most famous among them. He drew his inspiration from The Card Players by the Le Nain brothers, a painting that hung in a museum in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. Where the Le Nain brothers' original focused on the figures with a realistic, dramatic touch, Cézanne simplified the figures and instead focused entirely on form and composition themselves.

Look at the figures in this painting and you'll see they weren't rendered as the eye literally sees them, but built from basic geometric shapes — spheres, cylinders, cones. The faces are grounded in spherical forms, the arms in cylindrical ones. The same logic extends beyond the people to the chairs and table in the scene: the chairs and table show pronounced angular rectangles, the edge of the tablecloth comes to a point like a triangular cone, and the wine bottle resting on it takes the rounded shape of a cylinder.

This style is exactly why Cézanne is classified as a Post-Impressionist — a clear departure from early Impressionism, which simply captured a fleeting moment of light as the eye perceived it. Cézanne is called the father of modern art precisely because art shifted, through his work, from realistic depiction toward investigating the fundamental form of a subject. Picasso's Cubism, too, was born directly out of Cézanne's influence.