Madame Cézanne im gelben Sessel

Cezanne met Hortense Fiquet in Paris around 1869. She was 19, working as a bookbinder and sitting as an artist's model, and he hid her from his father for years, because the allowance he lived on depended on the old man's approval. Their son was born in 1872 and stayed hidden too. They finally married in Aix in the spring of 1886, 17 years after they met, and his father died that October, leaving him money enough to stop calculating. This portrait comes from the years just after, around 1890. Hortense sat for him roughly 29 times, more often than any other model he had, and in four of those canvases she is wearing the same dark red housedress she wears here.