Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair

Hortense Fiquet sits almost from edge to edge of Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair . Her dark hair rises above a pale, carefully modelled face; a blue jacket gathers into a large bow; folded hands rest where the jacket meets a broad striped skirt. Around her, the upholstered chair spreads in a startling red arc.

The catalogue raisonné identifies the Boston painting as FWN 443, dates it to about 1877, and also calls it Madame Cezanne à la jupe rayée —“Madame Cézanne in a Striped Skirt.” ^[1]

The English title invites a viewer to start with the chair; the French one with the skirt. Either route leads into the same puzzle. What initially seems an image of one seated person becomes a negotiation among several nearly equal presences: the red upholstery, blue clothing, green and cream stripes, ochre wall and small blue ornaments on it. Hortense is recognisable, yet her likeness never floats free of those surrounding shapes. The painting asks for attention to her and to the room that gives her form.

How the figure holds the canvas

The sitter’s narrow shoulders and comparatively small head give way to an expanding skirt. Its upper edge begins beneath the compressed knot of the hands, then fans toward both lower corners. Down its surface, light vertical bands make a second rhythm beside the upright strokes in the jacket. At the bottom, a broad flounce changes that rhythm: marks bend, overlap and become less regular. Because the cloth reaches the picture edge, the viewer cannot see how far the skirt extends into real space. Its painted breadth, rather than an imagined measurement of her body, determines the portrait’s base.

Above that base, the chair does an unexpected job. Its rounded back is offset to the sitter’s right, leaving more red visible on that side, while the left side presses in around her shoulder. The armrests curve forward in bright red coils and end in tassels, details that might ordinarily mark depth. Here their shapes also hold the jacket and skirt inside a loose frame. Pavel Machotka sees the slightly displaced chair and the pyramidal skirt as part of a calculated balance; he argues that the chair’s wings lie flatter than an illusionistic rendering would suggest. His reading helps explain why the figure’s small lean does not make the composition tip. ^[2]

Look at the hands after looking at the whole figure. They are neither a gesture addressed to us nor a prop used to tell a story. One hand crosses the other in a compact patch of pale, yellow and green tones. The knot they form interrupts the jacket’s downward flow just before the skirt opens out. Their placement lets the eye move between the little oval of the face, the bow at the chest and this second point of concentration. These intervals make the still pose active as a design without requiring a story about what Hortense feels.

A room shared with still lifes

The yellow-green wall is dotted with blue shapes that resemble small crosses within a repeating lozenge design. It is more than a decorative backdrop. Lawrence Gowing connected this wallpaper with a group of Cézanne still lifes and portraits associated with an apartment at 67 rue de l’Ouest in Paris. He placed the Boston portrait among works of about 1877 on stylistic grounds, while distinguishing them from another group using related room patterns and a more developed system of parallel brushstrokes. The wallpaper thus offers a concrete comparison across genres, though a repeated furnishing cannot by itself prove an exact day or sequence of painting. ^[3]

Art Institute of Chicago research likewise identifies the blue lozenge wallpaper in this portrait alongside examples in Cézanne’s still lifes. In its study of The Plate of Apples , the Boston canvas provides a comparison for the room pattern recurring behind different subjects. ^[4]

In this portrait the pattern is intermittent. A blue ornament appears above each side of the chair and another at the far left beside her shoulder; others are partly lost at the edges. The red back cuts across the wallpaper rather than neatly revealing a complete repeat. This cropping is useful to the painting. The fragments establish a measured surface behind the sitter, while the chair hides enough of it to bring her forward. The lower wall shifts into a darker turquoise band. Against it, the hanging red tassels become sharp punctuation marks, making the chair seem both attached to the room and insistently present before it.

Colour that makes form

The chair’s red is not a single flat block. It ranges from coral and scarlet at the arms to wine-dark areas behind Hortense’s right shoulder. Small green and blue strokes enter the red, just as ochre and green enter the blue-grey jacket. The transitions are easiest to follow around her face. Its yellow lights, cooler blue shadow and touches of green do not isolate the head in a separate flesh-colour scheme. They bind it to the rest of the canvas. Even the bow, apparently a simple blue accent, moves through several blues and greens before dissolving into the jacket.

Paul Smith reads these relationships as an especially resolved use of closely related tones. Comparing the Boston painting with an earlier portrait in Stockholm, he argues that the Boston image models face and clothing with subtler transitions and reduces the stark separation between sitter and chair. In his account, warm and cool contrasts make the forms legible while allowing them to occupy a tightly joined pictorial space. That is a stronger claim than simply calling the red “bright”: the colour gains its force because nearby blues, greens and ochres repeatedly alter how it looks. His proposed order of the two portraits remains an interpretation, rather than a date written on either canvas. ^[5]

Susan Sidlauskas describes the paint in the Boston portrait as substantial in the face and at transitions in the clothing, despite an initial impression of thinness. She also draws attention to the skirt’s interrupted bands and unsettled lower edge. Her close account makes a useful correction to viewing the canvas only as a set of broad colour masses: passages that look quiet from afar are materially busy. Sidlauskas is more inclined than Machotka to ask what the portrait withholds from an encounter with its sitter. Neither reading needs to turn a painted gaze into a diagnosis of Hortense herself. ^[6]

The sitter and the chair in later eyes

Rainer Maria Rilke saw the painting at the 1907 Salon d’Automne retrospective and wrote about it to his wife, Clara. As Sidlauskas notes, his description gave the chair an unusually strong role, almost a character in its own right. That response is understandable in front of a red shape that reaches around the sitter’s body and occupies so much of the upper canvas. Yet Rilke’s encounter is evidence of how one early viewer understood the work, not a key to Hortense’s thoughts. ^[6]

The catalogue lists titles referring to Madame Cézanne, the red armchair and the striped skirt. Its provenance runs through Vollard, Fabbri, Paul Rosenberg and Robert Treat Paine before the 1944 bequest to Boston. ^[1]