Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair1888–90
Hortense Fiquet, Cézanne’s companion and later his wife, sits with folded hands in a chair upholstered in yellow, wearing a maroon dress, her face calm and unreadable. More about this work
About this work
Hortense Fiquet, Cézanne’s companion and later his wife, sits with folded hands in a chair upholstered in yellow, wearing a maroon dress, her face calm and unreadable. Cézanne painted her more than twenty-five times, and she sat patiently through long sessions in which he treated her much as he treated his still lifes, as a structure of form and colour. This is one of a group of portraits of her in the same yellow chair, painted in the late 1880s, in which the firm verticals of the chair and the simplified figure create a subtle, carefully weighed balance.
Written by Ochre Editions.
What you’re looking at
Painting of a placid-looking, light-skinned woman in a maroon dress, seated in a chair with yellow upholstery, hands folded.
Description from the Art Institute of Chicago.
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 Art Institute of Chicago 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
- 1948.54
- Credit
- Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Type
- Painting
- Department
- Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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More by Paul Cézanne
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