Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair

Cezanne painted Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair between 1888 and 1890, at his family's estate at Jas de Bouffan, near Aix-en-Provence. The sitter is Hortense Fiquet, whom Cezanne had met in Paris in 1869 and married in 1886, after a relationship of seventeen years. She is the most painted woman in Cezanne's oeuvre: he produced 29 portraits of her between 1870 and 1893, more than any other subject. The painting shows Hortense seated in a yellow chair, her body turned slightly to the left, her hands folded in her lap. She wears a blue dress with a high collar, and her hair is pulled back in a simple style. The chair is painted in a warm, golden yellow that fills the lower right of the canvas. Behind her, the wall is painted in a cool, pale green, with a framed picture barely visible at the upper left. The composition is simple and frontal, with the figure filling most of the canvas. Cezanne's portraits of Hortense have a reputation for being cold and unloving. Critics have described her expression as vacant, her pose as rigid, her presence as a burden to the painter. This reading says more about the critics than about the paintings. Cezanne painted everyone with the same careful, detached attention: his wife, his son, his gardener, his card players, and himself. He was not interested in capturing personality or mood. He was interested in the structure of the face, the relationship between the figure and the space, and the way that color could describe form without traditional modeling. Hortense Fiquet was a bookbinder and a model when Cezanne met her in 1869. She was 18, he was 30. They had a son, Paul, in 1872, but Cezanne kept the relationship secret from his father, who controlled his finances, until their marriage in 1886. Hortense lived mostly in Paris while Cezanne lived mostly in Aix, and the arrangement seems to have suited both of them. She was not a muse in the Romantic sense. She was a model who happened to be married to the painter, and she sat for him with the patience of someone who had done it many times before. Oil on canvas, 80 by 64 centimeters. Cezanne built the face in parallel strokes of warm and cool tones, with the features described by the direction of the brushwork rather than by shadow. The blue dress is painted in layers of blue and gray, with the folds suggested by shifts in color temperature. The yellow chair is painted in thick, opaque strokes of cadmium yellow and ochre, with the wood grain suggested by the direction of the brush. The background is painted in thin, even layers of pale green, applied in short, regular strokes that give the wall a buzzing, vibrating quality. The vertical format and cool palette make this print work well in a study, bedroom, or hallway. The blues, greens, and warm yellow pair with white walls, natural wood, and rooms with a quiet mood. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the face room to read. The painting has a calm, structural quality that suits rooms with a serious or contemplative mood. The painting entered the Art Institute of Chicago's collection in 1944, gifted by Frank H. and Louise K. Woods. This is a public domain artwork, scanned from the original at the Art Institute of Chicago. 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.