page_title: Portrait of Madame Cézanne with Loosened Hair
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Portrait of Madame Cézanne with Loosened Hair / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Madame Cezanne in the gardenDeutsch: Madame Cezanne im Garten
context_page_description: Portrait of Madame Cézanne with Loosened Hair is an oil-on-canvas painting by French artist Paul Cézanne, variously dated from the mid-1870s to the early 1890s. Although the model, his wife Hortense Fiquet, was not supportive and did not understand or take an interest in her husband's work, this is one of forty-four portraits in which she sat for him from 1869, a period during which she progressed from mistress, to wife, to ex-wife. Something of a socialite, Cézanne latterly found Fiquet often fickle and shallow, and once remarked, "My wife only cares for Switzerland and lemonade". The sensitivity and depth ascribed to her in this work is likely drawn from his own personality and projected onto her image.
  While elements of the work show the influence of Impressionism, it lacks the characteristic extroverted charm of that movement, and instead focuses on the inner life of the subject. It departs from the artist's earlier portraits of his wife, whom he had earlier divorced, in its sensitivity, delicacy of tone and more relaxed countenance, as seen in the loosened fall of her hair.
context_section_description: In most of the other portraits Hortense Fiquet is presented in more formal attire that perhaps reflects the importance she ascribed to fashion; it is said that an appointment with a dressmaker caused her to be late to her husband's deathbed in 1906. Fiquet and Cézanne married on 28 April 1886, though by that time he had said that he no longer had any feelings for Hortense, whom one scholar has described as "a high-maintenance woman". Although he continued to paint his wife until the 1890s, he disinherited her; their only child, Paul (1872—1947) inherited the estate. The settlement that Hortense received from her son was squandered through gambling. After the death of Louis-Auguste Cézanne that same year, Cézanne and his wife separated, and he moved in with his sister and mother,  remarking, "My wife only cares for Switzerland and lemonade". The psychological distance between husband and wife appears to be reflected in the portraits where she gives the impression of self-absorption. The tilt of her head and body in this work, along with the look of submission and the downward-shaped mouth, are all indicative of an inward, self-concerned nature.
  Yet, the image is a tender representation of a coyness, shyness and sensitivity which art historian Meyer Schapiro believed to be a projection of Cézanne's own character. One critic wrote that Cézanne painted heads as if they were apples, a tendency very evident here in the blush of her cheek and the oval shape and curves of her face.
caption: Madame Cézanne in a Garden, unknown date. Here she is presented as more extroverted, and her real life restless nature is evident.
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