Madame Cézanne
Hortense Fiquet ( 1850-1922) played a pivotal role in the art and life of Paul Cézanne(1839-1906). She sat for twenty-nine portraits, more than any model in his long career. They met in Paris in 1869, when she was just nineteen. Three years later, Hortense gave birth to the artist’s only child, a son, Paul. Their liaison was a secret, shared only with a few, until their marriage in Aix-en-Provence in 1886, a union not to celebrate enduring love but rather to legitimize young Paul’s inheritance. Cézanne’s family and friends never embraced Hortense. She surfaces in the artist’s letters, especially those sent to writer Emile Zola, but often just in reference to the couple’s dire finances. They kept separate residences and traveled frequently as Cézanne’s studio practice developed.
It was against this background of neglect and uncertainty that Hortense modeled for some twenty years, posing for hours without moving or talking as the artist advanced his magisterial canvases. Cézanne preferred to paint subjects he knew well, whether the peaks of Mont Sainte-Victore or the jawline of his long-familiar companion. For him, the process of esthetic investigation, that translation of ephemeral visual experience into paint on canvas, then took hold intensely. Perceiving form in terms of color relationships, Cézanne transposed what he saw—his senesations of color—in patches of paint that, in turn, structured the image and determined its overall palette.
This is the first exhibition to bring together the portraits of Hortense Fiquet, Madame Cézanne, in oil, graphite, and watercolor. Some paintings are elaborately staged, while others are sparse bust-length studies. Motifs recur across the works, and yet no two portraits are truly alike. Pose and expression vary, as does the artist’s technique, degree of finish, handling, and palette. The drawings are intimate and full of feeling, while the paintings rarely communicate the same emotional attachment. It is thanks to the opportunity to closely examine the pictures, as works of art, as clues to a long relationship, that we come a little closer to Cézanne and to the woman who made his life all the more remarkable.
Foto veröffentlicht auf Flickr von by rverc am 2015-03-28 00:07:23
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