Description
Madame Cézanne in Blue – a single colour holds the whole work
The sitter is painted almost frontally, turned only a fraction; her dark hair is centre-parted and drawn back. She wears a blue jacket with a white turned collar that fills the lower two thirds of the canvas. Behind her, at the left, runs an olive-ochre wall carrying a row of long blue teardrop shapes, with the brown angular planes of a wooden surface beneath them; at the right stands a pale blue-white upright crossed by horizontal strokes. The canvas measures 74.1 × 61 cm, was made in 1886 and 1887 and is held by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Here the painter’s hand takes it over: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas.
The blue is not only on the jacket
Look closely and the same blue turns up three more times: in the teardrop shapes on the wall, in the pale upright along the right edge, and – strangest of all – in the shadow under the jaw and beside the nose. The face is not painted with a warm shadow but with the same colour as the garment, only thinned. That is why the work does not fall apart into figure and ground: it is held by a single colour, returning at different strengths across an olive base. It is partly for this that the work is known as Madame Cézanne in Blue.
One room, finished two ways
For this canvas the catalogue raisonné records two different wall treatments at once: wooden panelling and wallpaper. On the work this shows as a vertical seam just behind her head – to the left the darker patterned wall, to the right the pale panelling. The sitter is therefore placed on the border between two parts of the same room, and it is that seam which divides the canvas behind her back.
The third portrait of the same woman
Three portraits of the same woman now stand on our shelf, and the catalogue tells them apart by the rooms she sits in. In Madame Cézanne in a Striped Skirt the wall is papered with lozenges; in Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress no wallpaper is recorded at all, only the chair and the chair rail. Here both finishes appear together.
Because a single colour carries the work, it takes a large format well: the blue stays legible at a distance and the olive ground does not compete with it. It stands well in a bedroom, a study or a narrow hallway. Because the canvas is upright, the smallest size begins at 41 × 50 cm and the largest measures 146 × 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 still life in an equally cool range to go with this portrait, among our art paintings on canvas it is The Peppermint Bottle.
- Subject: Madame Cézanne in Blue, Paul Cézanne, 1886-1887, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the same blue is in the jacket, the wallpaper, the panelling and the shadow of the face
