Description
Woman with a Coffeepot – the catalogue does not know who she is
The woman sits square to the viewer and fills almost the whole height of a large canvas. Her dark hair is drawn back, her face calm and frontal. She wears a blue dress buttoned to the throat, with a broad belt tied at the waist and a long skirt falling to the lower edge; her hands rest in her lap. At the right stands a table under a brown-ochre cloth, carrying a white cup on its saucer with a spoon standing upright in it, and behind the cup a tall cylindrical metal coffeepot with a domed lid. Behind her, grey-green panelling in large rectangles. The original measures 130 × 97 cm, was made about 1895 and is held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Here the painter’s hand takes it over: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas.
A sitter without a name
For portraits the catalogue raisonné usually enters a name under its heading for people. For this canvas something else stands there: unidentified sitter. Among the titles the work has carried, “La Domestique” – the servant – does appear, but the catalogue does not confirm it and does not record it as a fact; it stays with not knowing her. So do we. For the portraits of Hortense Fiquet the catalogue knows the name; for this canvas it does not.
A still life inside a portrait
It is worth noticing where the catalogue files the objects on the table. The coffeepot, the cup and the spoon are not listed among the furnishings but among the still-life objects – the same group to which the apples and jugs of other canvases belong. The portrait therefore carries a small still life in its right-hand third, and it is that still life which gives the work its name. The spoon standing upright in the cup repeats the vertical of the pot, and the pot repeats the vertical of the panelling edge behind them.
What looks like wallpaper is a screen
Down the left edge runs a narrow strip of darker ground scattered with white and pink rosettes. At first glance it reads as wallpaper, but among the furnishings of the room the catalogue records something else: a folding screen. The cloth on the table is not a tablecloth either, but oilcloth. The room is therefore assembled from three different surfaces – panelling, screen and oilcloth – and each is recorded separately.
Because the original is large and the figure takes up nearly its whole height, this work reads best when you give it room: in a hallway, on a staircase, or along a longer living-room wall. Because the canvas is upright, the smallest size begins at 40 × 55 cm and the largest measures 131 × 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. The portrait whose name the catalogue does know is Madame Cézanne in Blue; from the same Paris collection comes Still Life with Onions, and the vessels from this table turn up again in Straw-Trimmed Vase, Sugar Bowl and Apples.
- Subject: Woman with a Coffeepot, Paul Cézanne, about 1895, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the catalogue lists the sitter as unidentified – it enters no name
