Five versions, and the famous price

This is not a single picture but the end of a series of five. They run, roughly, from crowded to bare. The largest holds five figures, three players plus a standing onlooker and a seated boy, and lives at the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia. A four-figure version is at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Then the series pares down to just two players facing each other, in three canvases: one at the Courtauld in London, one in a private collection, and the small, distilled one you are reading about, at the Musée d’Orsay.

The arc is one of subtraction. Figures drop away, the onlookers vanish, the room empties, and what is left grows quieter and more monumental. The Orsay canvas is the smallest of all and the most stripped, the series boiled down to its essence. (The order in which Cézanne painted them is not actually settled; the move from crowded to spare is how the finished pictures read, not a proven chronology.)

You have probably heard that The Card Players is one of the most expensive paintings ever sold, and that is true, but you have to keep the canvases straight. The record sale was not this Orsay picture. Around 2011, one of the larger two-player versions, the one that had belonged to the Greek shipping magnate George Embiricos, was sold to the royal family of Qatar. The reported price was around $250 million, with estimates running as high as $320 million, which at the time made it, reportedly, the highest price ever paid for any painting, a record that stood until 2017.

Two cautions, because the press almost always blurs both. First, that figure was never officially confirmed; it is a leaked, reported number, so “around $250 million, reportedly” is as firm as anyone can honestly be. Second, and more important: the canvas that fetched it is a different picture from the one in front of you. The Orsay version, the small and distilled last word of the series, is priceless in the literal museum sense, never for sale. The record belongs to its larger cousin in Qatar.