Description
Madame Cézanne in a Striped Skirt – two patterns in one work
The woman sits square to the viewer, her dark hair drawn up. She wears a blue-grey bodice with a soft bow at the throat, her hands folded in her lap, and the lower half of the canvas is filled by a skirt of vertical stripes in pale green, cream and blue-green. She sits in a red armchair whose back rises behind her shoulders and which carries a red tassel at the left and another at the right. Behind her stands an olive-ochre wall with blue lozenges. The canvas measures 72.4 × 55.9 cm, was made about 1877 and is held by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here the painter’s hand takes it over: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas.
Stripes and lozenges
Two patterns stand on this canvas, and the catalogue raisonné records them separately. The first is in the work’s own title: the striped skirt. The second sits among the motif keywords: wallpaper with lozenges. The two do not imitate one another – one runs vertically, the other on the diagonal – yet they hold each other in balance, so that the work is ordered below by straight lines and above by slanting ones. Between them the face remains the only surface without a pattern.
The red armchair
The third mass is the chair. The red is the only warm colour on the canvas and the only larger surface that is not broken up: the back rises behind the shoulders as an unbroken piece of colour, and two tassels hang from it, one on each side. The catalogue lists the armchair separately among the objects, as it does the wallpaper and the dress. The red of the chair and the cool blue-green of the dress are the only true opposites in this work.
Who sits in the chair
The catalogue keeps a heading of its own for the woman in this work: Hortense Fiquet, the painter’s wife. On our shelf this is the first face that is not the painter’s own – his you will find in the Self-Portrait with a Pink Background. From the same Boston collection we also have Fruit and a Jug on a Table.
The work is built on three large fields – the red, the blue-grey and the striped – and it is exactly this that keeps it legible at large sizes, where the stripes become real bands of colour. It works well in a living room or a bedroom, where it has distance enough. Because the canvas is upright, the smallest size begins at 42 × 55 cm and the largest measures 138 × 180 cm. Intermediate measurements we stretch to custom size on the stretcher frame, and how it will look framed is shown by our 3D rendering application. If you want a second interior to set beside this scene, among our art paintings on canvas it is The Buffet.
- Subject: Madame Cézanne in a Striped Skirt, Paul Cézanne, about 1877, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the catalogue records both patterns separately – the stripes of the dress and the lozenges of the wall
