Madame Cezanne in a Red Dress

Cezanne painted this portrait of his wife Hortense Fiquet between 1888 and 1890 at his family's estate in Jas de Bouffan, near Aix-en-Provence. He had been painting Hortense for over 20 years by this point, producing 29 portraits of her between 1869 and the 1890s. More than any other sitter, she was the constant subject of his portraiture. Hortense sits in a red dress with a white collar, her hands folded in her lap, her face turned slightly toward the viewer. The background is a patterned wallpaper in blues and greens, painted in flat, parallel brushstrokes that tilt and shift across the surface. A curtain at the right is painted in the same red as the dress, merging figure and ground. The chair she sits on is barely indicated, a few dark lines at the bottom of the canvas. Cezanne met Hortense in Paris in 1869. She was a seamstress and a bookbinder, ten years younger than him. They had a son in 1872 but did not marry until 1886, partly because Cezanne's father opposed the match and threatened to cut off his allowance. Their relationship was difficult: Cezanne painted her constantly but rarely lived with her, preferring the solitude of Provence to domestic life. She appears in his paintings as a patient, unsmiling presence, her face built from the same faceted brushwork as his landscapes. The portrait is built on Cezanne's mature method of constructing form through color. The face is painted in patches of pink, green, and ochre, each patch a separate observation of how light falls on a particular plane. The dress is built in layers of red, ranging from deep crimson to orange-pink, with the shadows painted in complementary greens. The background wallpaper is painted in blues that vibrate against the red of the dress, creating the optical tension that Cezanne spent his career pursuing. By 1888, Cezanne was 49 and had largely withdrawn from the Paris art world. He lived in Provence and worked in isolation, painting landscapes at Mont Sainte-Victoire and portraits of his wife, his gardener, and local peasants. His work was barely known outside a small circle of painters and collectors. The retrospective of his work in 1895, organized by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, was the event that made his name public and established him as the father of modern painting. Oil on canvas, 116 by 89 centimeters. The paint is applied in thin, overlapping patches, each one a distinct color note. The surface has a dense, woven quality, with no visible drawing underneath. Cezanne built the form entirely through the relationship of colors, not through line. The vertical format and warm red palette make this print work well in a living room, dining room, or bedroom. The reds and blues pair with both warm and cool wall colors. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the brushwork room to read. The portrait has a formal, still quality that suits rooms with traditional furniture and good lighting. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1962, purchased with the Henry Ittleson Jr. Purchase Fund. It is one of four portraits of Madame Cezanne in the Met's collection. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.