Madame Cézanne (Hortense Fiquet, 1850–1922) in a Red Dress1888–90
Hortense Fiquet, Cézanne’s wife, sits in a red dress in a yellow armchair, her expression withdrawn and inward. More about this work
About this work
Hortense Fiquet, Cézanne’s wife, sits in a red dress in a yellow armchair, her expression withdrawn and inward. The space around her refuses to settle: the floor seems to tilt, objects at the edges are cut off at odd angles, and the figure appears to be held in place only by the balance of colours and forms. Painted in Paris in the late 1880s, it belongs to a group of portraits of her in the same chair and is one of Cézanne’s most ambitious figure paintings.
Written by Ochre Editions.
How it was made
- Oil paint
- Pigment ground in a drying oil, usually linseed. It dries slowly, so painters could blend on the canvas, build up thin translucent glazes, and rework a picture over weeks. Canvas replaced wooden panels in the 1500s because it is lighter and can be rolled.
Paul Cézanne
French, 1839–1906 · Born and died in Aix-en-Provence.
Cézanne divided his life between Paris and his native Aix-en-Provence. Encouraged by his schoolfriend Émile Zola and later by Pissarro, with whom he painted at Pontoise and Auvers in the 1870s, he showed at the first and third Impressionist exhibitions. He then withdrew to Provence and worked towards a more structured art, building form from patches of colour in still lifes, bathers and repeated views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. Younger painters, Picasso and Braque among them, saw him as a founder of modern painting.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Post-Impressionism
Artists who kept Impressionism's colour but pushed towards structure, symbol and feeling.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Met has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 62.45
- Credit
- Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Type
- Paintings
- Department
- European Paintings
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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More by Paul Cézanne
All their works
Close in colour
