Paul Cézanne - Madame Cezanne with unbound hair 1890-1892
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Madame Cezanne with unbound hair 1890-1892
61x51cm oil/canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA
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Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections
Paul Cézanne met Hortense Fiquet in Paris in 1869, when she was a nineteen-year-old artist's model. Their only child, Paul, Jr., was born in 1872; the couple married, perhaps as much to please Cézanne's dying father as for any other reason, in 1886. From what little is known of their lives, their relationship was difficult, and she certainly never comprehended the importance of her husband's art, although she did sit for him for some forty-four portraits. For all the formal power of these images, which often, as seen here, have a sense of volume in space that is nearly sculptural, they are also among the most moving portraits of the nineteenth century, a quality that is never more evident than in this melancholy and haunting picture.
Joseph J. Rishel, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 208.