Paul Cézanne: The Painter’s Wife Notecard Folio

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) is considered one of the most influential artists in the history of Modern art. Cézanne’s analytical approach to painting—his attempt to represent the “structure,” or geometry, underlying nature and all his subjects—challenged the spontaneity of Impressionism and influenced many avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, including Cubism and Fauvism.

In 1869, Cézanne met his future wife, Hortense Fiquet, who was working as an artist’s model in Paris. Beginning in the early 1870s and continuing through the mid-1890s, he painted nearly thirty portraits of her, including the two portraits in this folio, Portrait of Madame Cézanne and Woman with Green Hat.

These portraits, among many other important works by Cézanne, are from the collection of The Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania, which was established by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in 1922 to “promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts.” In his 1925 book, The Art in Painting, Dr. Barnes, whose collection includes sixty-nine works by Cézanne, wrote, “Cézanne ranks with the greatest painters of all ages because, by the use of means purely plastic and by a new use of the most difficult of those means—color—he realized a form of the highest conviction and power. . . . He rendered the essential qualities of . . . feelings stripped of the irrelevant and the accidental, and endowed them with the pervasive mystery, power, and charm that make them moving, vital, and beautiful.”

Contains 5 each of the following images:
Portrait of Madame Cézanne, 1888–1890
Woman with Green Hat (Madame Cézanne), 1891–1892