Seated Woman in Blue

Cézanne painted this in the last years of his life, around 1902 to 1906, working slowly and mostly alone near Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. When Duncan Phillips bought it for his Washington museum, it was understood to be a portrait of the painter's wife, Hortense, and an early photograph of it even carried the caption 'The Artist's Wife.' Most scholars now doubt that. The face does not much resemble Hortense, and the mood between painter and sitter is oddly formal and distant, more like a hired model than a spouse of thirty years. So we are left looking at a woman in a blue dress and hat whose name we do not actually know. Cézanne built her almost entirely out of planes of blue and grey, letting the bare canvas show through in places, in the patient, unfinished-looking manner of his final years.