Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress

The woman in red is Hortense Fiquet, Cézanne's wife, painted around 1888 to 1890 against a cool blue-green wall. The museum that owns her describes the dress as a kind of sculpture in a single colour. How she got to Brazil is a story about São Paulo in the late 1940s. The newspaper owner Assis Chateaubriand was assembling an art museum there almost from nothing, and he raised the money by leaning on the city's rich. In a speech he later printed in his own papers, he told potential donors that the bourgeois world was under Soviet attack, and that one way to shore it up was to give Renoirs, Cézannes and El Grecos to the museum. This portrait came in 1949, and its credit line still names who paid: a bank, a chemical and pharmaceutical company, two flour mills and three private donors, one of them anonymous.