Madame Cezanne in a Green Hat

Paul Cezanne painted this portrait of his wife around 1891, during the period when he was living in Paris but returning frequently to his native Aix-en-Provence. Hortense Fiquet, his companion since 1869 and the mother of his son Paul, had married him in 1886 after a relationship of seventeen years. Hortense sits in a chair, facing the viewer, her head slightly turned. She wears a green hat with a curved brim and a dark dress with a high collar. Her hands are folded in her lap. The background is a flat, undifferentiated green-grey. The face is built up in patches of warm and cool tones, with the features suggested rather than described. The hat is the most prominent element, its green form filling the upper third of the canvas. The canvas is roughly 16 by 13 inches. Cezanne painted Hortense twenty-nine times between 1869 and the 1890s, more than any other sitter. The portraits are not flattering. Cezanne was not interested in capturing a likeness in the conventional sense. He was interested in the structure of the face, the relationship between forms, the way color could build volume. Hortense's face in these paintings is often mask-like, her expression unreadable. The portraits have been read as cold, as evidence of a difficult marriage, and as simply the result of Cezanne's method, which treated all subjects with the same analytical attention. The green hat portrait belongs to the 1890s, when Cezanne was developing the late style that would influence Picasso and Braque. The face is broken into facets, with each patch of color contributing to the overall structure. The hat is painted as a solid form, its curves and planes rendered with careful attention to how they catch the light. Cezanne was 52 in 1891. He had been painting for over twenty years and had only recently begun to receive recognition. The 1895 retrospective organised by Ambroise Vollard established his reputation, but the portraits of Hortense remained in his studio until after his death. Oil on canvas, 41 by 33 centimeters. Cezanne used a palette of greens, browns, and flesh tones, applied in small, parallel strokes. The background is a single layer of paint, thin enough to show the canvas weave. This portrait works well in a study, bedroom, or hallway. The 11x14 framed version in a black frame suits the intimate scale and restrained palette. The painting is in the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. This is a public domain artwork, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 24x36 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.