Interpretive Resource

By all accounts, Paul Cezanne's marriage was not an easy or close one. If one can read be-tween the lines, so to speak, of Cezanne’s portraits of his wife, one can sense something of the tensions between them. In this painting, Madame Cezanne appears to bear her trials as wife and model with a supreme patience that borders on indiffer-ence. Her face resembles a mask, with its almond eye-slits and simplified nose. Her hair is pulled tightly back, her lips are sealed. Yet, she seems to fidget with her hands. The implied movement of the hands belies the apparent calm of Madame Cezanne's pose and self-absorbed expression.

Cezanne painted three portraits of his wife in the same damask-covered yellow chair, and they ap-pear to have been done within a very short period. The largest and most complex of the three, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, includes elaborate drapery, the edge of a mantelpiece, and a fire tong. The Art Institutes portrait and a third ver-sion, in a private New York collection, are smaller and simpler. In each, Madame Cezanne is identically posed and the props are reduced to the chair and the wainscoting of the wall behind. The classical calm and regularity of these portraits combine with a cer-tain bourgeois simplicity. Cezanne refused to allow even a hint of fashionability to enter here: his wife wears no hat or jewelry, and the chair is a type com-monly found in French middle-class houses from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

For Cezanne, the execution of a portrait in-volved the same demands as a still life: the structure of the figure, the definition of forms and relation be-tween them, the orchestration of color in building the composition — all required careful consideration. The two smaller versions of Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Armchair seem to have been exercises in the use of the three primary colors — the red of the dress, the yellow of the chair, and the blue of the wall. In each, Madame Cezanne's face has been painted with myriad hues, but the purple-red, yellow, and blue come together in small patches around the mouth. The composition has been organized into a series of horizontal and vertical lines and ovals. The lines, set on a diagonal bias, are echoed in the careful arrange-ment in the features and shadow on the face. The oval head is repeated in the shape of the body within the slightly bowed arms, the pattern of the up-holstery, and the hands. The stillness of the pose and reserved expression of the sitter are set against subtle manipulations of the background and chair. For all of the apparent resistance by Madame Cezanne to re-vealing here anything about her thoughts and feel-ings, in the Art Institute painting Cezanne succeeded in creating a depiction of her that is at once dig-nified, complex, and monumental.