Portrait of the Artist's Wife

Portrait of the Artist's Wife of around 1877, in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, was painted during a period when Cézanne and Hortense were living between Paris and the south of France, managing the complicated logistics of a relationship his controlling father still did not know about. The late 1870s are the years when Cézanne's mature method was first definitively established, and this portrait of Hortense shows the transition from the heavier gestural approach of his early works to the carefully structured surface of the mature portraits. The Nationalmuseum holds this work as the centrepiece of its French Post-Impressionist holdings, a single key acquisition representing the artist at a pivotal moment of technical development. Hortense sits with the composed, slightly absent expression that characterises her across all of Cézanne's portraits of her.

The work's surface shows the early form of Cézanne's modular stroke: individual touches of colour are applied in roughly parallel orientations that begin to create the characteristic texture of his mature work, though the approach is less consistent than in the later portraits. The relatively simple pose allows the technique itself to be the primary pictorial interest.