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

Painted c.1877 and held at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair is the earliest and among the most intimate of the approximately two dozen known portraits of Hortense Fiquet, the model who became Cézanne's companion and the mother of his son Paul. Hortense was an infinitely patient sitter — she reportedly sat for him in absolute stillness for hours — and became, alongside Mont Sainte-Victoire, his most recurrent subject. This early portrait shows her seated formally in a striped dress in a red armchair, the striped upholstery of the chair rhyming with the striped pattern of her skirt.

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.