‘The Card Players’ (painting)

The Card Players is a series of oil paintings by Paul Cezanne, a French Post-Impressionist painter. There are five works in the series, all painted during Cezanne's final era in the early 1890s. The game's size, number of players, and setting all differ between versions. In preparation for The Card Players series, Cezanne made various drawings and studies.

In 2011, the Royal Family of Qatar purchased one version of The Card Players for $250 million ($287.6 million today), setting a new record for the highest ever price paid for a painting, which was not surpassed until November 2017.

Local farmhands served as models for the works, some of whom worked on the Cézanne family estate, the Jas de Bouffan. The men gaze down at their cards rather than at each other in each scenario, with the cards possibly being their only form of communication outside of work. The scenes were regarded as "human still life" by one critic, while another thought that the men's intense focus on their game mirrored the painter's devotion in his work.

Cost: 275 million USD