Madame Cézanne à la jupe rayée (Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair)

Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (c.1877) at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston is the earliest of the major Hortense portraits — painted when Cézanne and Hortense had been together for about six years but were still concealing the relationship from Cézanne's domineering father. The red armchair, with its rich crimson upholstery, provides the boldest chromatic element in any of the Hortense portraits, creating a vivid color foundation that connects the portrait to the warm palette of Cézanne's early work. By 1877 he had fully absorbed the Impressionist palette while beginning to move beyond it — the striped pattern of the dress is handled with the kind of systematic parallel brushwork that would become characteristic of his mature method. The Boston MFA acquired this as a foundational work of Post-Impressionism, situating it within an American collection that had important holdings of French painting through the Impressionist period. Hortense's cool, frontal gaze across this and subsequent portraits creates one of the most sustained and challenging portrait series in nineteenth-century art.

The vertical striped pattern of the dress is rendered with disciplined parallel brushwork that simultaneously describes fabric and demonstrates Cézanne's structural method. The red of the armchair is a vivid chromatic anchor, modulated from scarlet to deep carmine across its curved forms. Hortense's face is built with careful, cool tonal patches that give her an almost sculptural impassivity.