It is a painting of startling simplicity. Two farm labourers contemplate their cards above an empty table, their expressions as blank as the austere background against which they are posed, little more than objects in a human still life created by the artist Paul Cezanne. Yet in the crazy 21st-century world of billionaire plutocrats and sovereign wealth funds fighting over the world’s few remaining true masterpieces, this stripped-down image - measuring little more than a metre square - has nearly doubled the previous record for the highest price paid for an art work. It has emerged that The Card Players has been bought for £158 million ($300 million) by the Qatari royal family.
   The sale, from the collection of the late Greek shipping magnate George Embiricos, heralds the arrival of the tiny oil-rich Gulf state as the pre-eminent force in the international art market. As details of the purchase leaked out in Vanity Fair, experts hailed it as a watershed moment in a market which found itself uncharacteristically subdued last year as the Western economy faltered in the grip of the eurozone crisis and new buyers from Asia, Russia and the Middle East preferred to do deals in private.
   The series is considered by critics to be a cornerstone of Cézanne’s work during the early-to-mid 1890s period, as well as a “prelude” to his final years, when he painted some of his most acclaimed work. Each painting depicts Provençal peasants immersed in smoking their pipes and playing cards. The subjects, all male, are displayed as studious within their card playing, eyes cast downward, intent on the game at hand. Cézanne adapted a motif from 17th century Dutch and French genre painting which often depicted card games with rowdy, drunken gamblers in taverns, replacing them instead with stone-faced tradesmen in a more simplified setting. Whereas previous paintings of the genre had illustrated heightened moments of drama, Cézanne’s portraits have been noted for their lack of drama, narrative, and conventional characterization. Other than an unused wine bottle in the two-player versions, there is an absence of drink and money, which were prominent fixtures of the 17th century genre. A painting by one of the Le Nain brothers depicting card players at a museum in Aix-en-Provence, near the artist’s residence, is widely believed to have been an inspiration for Cézanne.