he has reduced the event to its most basic elements ΓÇô two players, an anonymous background, no onlookers ΓÇô and just a few descriptive details ΓÇô the clay pipe and a bottle of wine. The sombre nature of the setting gives the players a grandeur reminiscent of the figures in MasaccioΓÇÖs 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 Andr┼╜ P┼╜rat┼╜, the critic from La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, when he came across the work at the retrospective exhibition of the Salon dΓÇÖAutomne 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: ΓÇÿIs it not just like looking through an open window into this shabby caf┼╜, where whiffs of absinthe hang around and where flies have left their marks on the walls?ΓÇÖ C┼╜zanne was, of course, interested in the subject matter ΓÇô it is never wholly absent from his work ΓÇô 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.
