Femme en bleu

The woman in the blue dress was almost certainly Madame Brémond, the housekeeper who ran Cézanne's home in Aix and looked after him in his last years. He painted her around 1900, near the very end of his life, and he treats her the way he treated a mountain or a bowl of apples. The face and the dress and the wall behind are all built from the same small parallel strokes of colour, patch laid beside patch, so the figure feels assembled rather than posed. He was not chasing a likeness. He was working out how to make a solid thing out of nothing but blocks of paint, and younger painters were watching closely. The Fauves and then the Cubists would take exactly this apart a few years later.