Lady in Blue

Lady in Blue (1904) at the Hermitage Museum is among the last major figure paintings Cézanne produced before his death from pleurisy in 1906. By this late period his figure work had converged with the spatial investigations of his landscape and still-life production: the woman seated in a room is treated with the same planar color construction he applied to the Sainte-Victoire and the Château Noir. The blue of the dress — a strong, saturated blue typical of his late palette — provided the compositional anchor that organized the surrounding space, much as a dominant color note organized his most ambitious still-life arrangements. Cézanne painted several 'lady in blue' type figures in his final years, possibly using the same model or members of his Aix household as sitters. The Hermitage acquired this canvas as part of the extraordinary collection of French Post-Impressionism assembled before the Russian Revolution by Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, whose purchases of Cézannes, Matisses, and Picassos in the early twentieth century created one of the world's finest collections of modern art in Moscow and St. Petersburg before the works were nationalized.

Cézanne renders the lady in blue with his characteristic constructive approach — the figure built through his systematic planar brushstroke, the blue of the dress organized through tonal modulation rather than conventional modeling. His treatment of the figure's relationship to the space around her applies the same spatial investigation he pursued in his still-life arrangements: the figure becomes a three-dimensional form in space, its edges and surfaces analyzed through his unique pictorial method.