The people who spend their lives slowly and with feeling on this flourishing ancient land were a source of inspiration for Cezanne. “I love all those who live and grow old without trying to change customs,” he said, “who calmly allow themselves to live in accordance with the laws of the time.” As players, Cezanne asked the surrounding farmers to pose for him. The world around them seems to be fashioned from the same material as themselves. The uniform "texture" of people and the surrounding space especially attracted the artist.

While in 2015, Paul Gauguin’s painting “When is the wedding?” failed to sell for $300 million, Cezanne's The Card Players remained the world's most expensive painting ever offered for sale in the last century and a half. The Emir of Qatar bought the painting in 2011 for his private collection (for 250 million).

Unlike many of his artist friends who doubted the value of their own works, Cezanne periodically clearly felt, and sometimes declared out loud, that he was a genius and that his paintings would not begin to be understood very soon after his death. Even friends, future impressionist artists, who organized their revolutionary exhibitions, were afraid of Cezanne’s wild paintings. Critics, even without Cezanne, indiscriminately despised them all, but with Cezanne, the events they started looked deliberately and excessively provocative.

Art critics find in this series, consisting of 5 paintings, many unconfirmed philosophical and symbolic meanings. There were attempts to consider here the allegory of a picturesque battle, from which Cezanne himself emerges victorious, there were variations on the theme of cards of fate and the choice that a person makes himself from the opportunities given to him to choose from. Fans of psychological implications saw in the plot a confrontation between Paul and his father, which lasted until the death of the old man, and the Cubists, who declared Cézanne their predecessor, argued that these figures had no more soulfulness than a still life, that all painting was nothing more than a “cylinder” , ball and cone." But Cézanne is unlikely to be so simple - if he had been interested solely in shapes, he would not have left the workshop and simply ordered a kilogram of apples for a week.

In fact, the artist could have all these meanings in mind or none - much more important is the potential challenge to the viewer: to connect to the creation of meanings, to create and strain to understand.

We can assume with greater confidence what particularly attracted Cezanne to the playing process: intense confrontation and mental work with complete immobility. This is precisely why Paul loved mountains and apples - for stillness. It was precisely these sitters that he dreamed of, losing his temper when his tired wife, at the 20th posing session, suddenly moved and ruined everything. He dreamed that people were like apples. And finally leaving loud, bustling Paris for the estate of his father Zsa de Bouffan, he found his apples. Local peasants, gardeners, maids, they knew how to be truly still and focused, they lived measuredly and thoughtfully, in the same rhythm with nature, with the sun.

Working on the series for more than five years, Cezanne began with a huge two-meter canvas and a multi-figure composition (1), in the second picture he reduced the number of figures to four (2), and in the rest he left only the most important thing - two rivals, a bottle, which they are most likely to and play, table and cards. Nothing superfluous and distracting, nothing transient and momentary. Only eternal.