Portrait of a Woman (Portrait de femme)

Portrait of a Woman (c.1892) at the Barnes Foundation represents Cézanne's approach to the female figure as a formal subject equivalent to landscape and still life rather than a psychological or social document. By the early 1890s his portrait method had fully shed the conventions of psychological portraiture: the face is treated as a three-dimensional structure of color planes, the expression is impassive, the setting is minimal. Contemporary painters like Whistler and Sargent were creating portraits of powerful social presence and technical virtuosity; Degas was bringing psychological acuity to his female portraits; Cézanne's approach was radically different, concerned with formal analysis rather than social performance. The female models he used in Aix-en-Provence — local women, possibly domestic servants, occasionally his wife Hortense — were treated with consistent democratic impassivity. The Barnes Foundation's holding documents this approach alongside the more famous Hortense portraits that are his most recognized figure paintings.

The face is modeled through adjacent color patches of warm flesh, cool grey, and muted ochre. No feature is defined by outline alone; each plane of the face—forehead, cheekbone, jaw—is identified through a directional color patch. The background is summarily indicated in loose horizontal strokes, allowing the face structure to dominate.