Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair
1888–90
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
80.9 × 64.9 cm (31 13/16 × 25 9/16 in.); Framed: 106.7 × 90.2 × 11.2 cm (42 × 35 1/2 × 4 3/8 in.)
Classification
oil on canvas
Department
Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
62371
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
This portrait is one in a series of four Paul Cezanne made of his wife, Emélie-Hortense Fiquet, whom he met when she worked as an artist’s model. They had a son together in 1872 and married in 1886. Technical examination suggests that Cezanne traced this image, the second in the series, from the first portrait, which he made from life. In contrast to her masklike expression, Hortense’s hands are agitated, contorted by crisscrossing brushstrokes and the dark-blue outlines Cezanne used to sketch o...
About the Artist
Paul Cezanne · 1839–1906
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), born in Aix-en-Provence to a prosperous banker father, Louis-Auguste, and mother Anne-Elisabeth-Honorine Aubert, grew up in a bourgeois family that later acquired the Jas de Bouffan estate, where he painted his earliest murals. As a youth, he formed the inseparable trio "Les Trois Inséparables" with schoolmates Émile Zola and Baptistin Baille. Despite his father's wishes ...