Portrait of Madame Cezanne

The woman in the blue dress is Hortense Fiquet, and Cezanne painted her more than 40 times, almost always with this same still, unsmiling calm. They had been together some seventeen years, and had a son, before he finally married her in Aix in 1886, around the time of this portrait. A few months after the wedding his father died and left him a fortune, ending the money worries that had kept the relationship half-hidden from the old man. She sits slightly turned, head tilted, the face built up in patient planes of colour rather than smooth modelling. He rarely asked her to do anything but hold still.