he has reduced the event to its most basic elements – two players, an anonymous background, no onlookers – and just a few descriptive details – the clay pipe and a bottle of wine. The sombre nature of the setting gives the players a grandeur reminiscent of the figures in Masaccio’s paintings.
	Two farm workers from the Jas de Bouffan came to sit in the family home for this scene. They wore their Sunday-best clothes and new hats. The brush strokes that, colour patch after colour patch, were used to build up the painting were wrongly interpreted as stains on the clothes and tablecloth by AndrŽ PŽratŽ, the critic from La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, when he came across the work at the retrospective exhibition of the Salon d’Automne in 1907. Certain of the rightness of his opinion, he considered the work to be a true manifesto of realism in the style of Courbet, and he wrote: ‘Is it not just like looking through an open window into this shabby cafŽ, where whiffs of absinthe hang around and where flies have left their marks on the walls?’ CŽzanne was, of course, interested in the subject matter – it is never wholly absent from his work – but its anecdotal aspect was unimportant to him. He was not a genre painter, and he chose only those subjects and places for his works that had a timeless quality.