Madame Cézanne in Blue

Madame Cézanne in Blue, at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, is one of roughly twenty-seven surviving portraits Cézanne made of his wife Hortense Fiquet between the 1870s and 1890s. Painted around 1888–1890, it is characteristic of his treatment of her: frontal, still, monumentally patient. Hortense was a model of extraordinary endurance, reportedly sitting for sessions lasting many hours while Cézanne worked with agonizing deliberateness. The blue of her dress dominates the canvas, establishing the work's chromatic gravity and making the portrait as much a study in color as in personality.

The figure is organized around the vertical axis of the body, with the blue dress built from overlapping strokes of cobalt, Prussian blue, and grey-blue. Hortense's face receives more precise modeling than her dress, with thin glazes of pink and ochre constructing the planes of her cheeks and forehead without illusionistic softening.