Christie's
ARTIST Cézanne
TITLE 'A Card Player'
AUCTION HOUSE Christie's
ESTIMATE $15 million to $20 million
For nearly six decades this watercolor, depicting Paulin Paulet, a gardener on Cézanne’s family estate near Aix-en-Provence, France, was familiar to scholars only as a black-and-white photograph. No one knew if the actual work, a study for Cézanne’s celebrated Card Players paintings, still existed and if it did, who owned it.
But it recently resurfaced, and the Dallas collector who had it in his home is selling it on Tuesday. Cézanne’s images of workers on his farm — pipe-smoking men sitting around a table, their expressions dour, absorbed in a game of cards — are among his most recognizable work. Executed from 1890 to 1896, they were the artist’s take on genre paintings made famous by 17th-century Dutch masters. Although not as instantly recognizable as “The Scream,” the watercolor is considered an art historical landmark, but one that will most likely appeal to the connoisseur collector rather than a speculator or a trophy hunter.
