Hortense Fiquet sat for her husband more often than anyone else, in twenty-nine known portraits, and she is not smiling in one of them. The usual explanation is that the marriage was cold. The Art Institute's examination of this canvas points somewhere else: it was traced off an earlier portrait.
Sit like an apple
Cezanne was slow. His dealer Ambroise Vollard sat for him in 1899 and counted a hundred and fifteen sittings for one portrait, mostly in silence, and remembered being told to sit like an apple: an apple does not move.
That is not an eccentricity, it is the method. He was not catching a likeness in an afternoon. He was building a surface patch by patch over months, each small plane of colour set against the one beside it, and the whole thing collapses if the thing in front of him shifts.
So the person he painted most was the person who would hold still. Hortense Fiquet met him in Paris around 1869, when she was working as an artist's model and was nineteen. They had a son in 1872 and married in 1886. For twenty years she is the body in the chair, not moving, in portrait after portrait.
Traced
There are four portraits of her in the same red dress with the shawl collar. This is the second, and it is the only one that puts her in a furnished room — the apartment Cezanne rented at 15 quai d'Anjou in Paris between 1888 and 1890, props wedged in around her, the yellow chair tipping forward out of the picture.
The Art Institute's technical examination of it points to tracing: the image appears to have been taken off the first portrait, the one he made in front of her, rather than off her.
Look at what that leaves. Her face is flat and still, almost a mask. Her hands are not: they are worked over with crisscrossing strokes, and the dark blue lines he used to set out the shapes are still sitting there in the finished paint, never covered up.
A century of reading her face
The flat expression has been read as coldness for a century, and the biography can be made to fit. Cezanne hid Hortense and their son from his father for years; when the old man found out, he cut his son's allowance. The couple spent long stretches living in different towns.
But the other reading is just as available, and it is in the paint. No other person appears in his work half as often. Twenty-nine times she took a chair, arranged her hands and stopped — for a man who needed a human being to behave like a piece of fruit, and who in the end took the trouble to trace her outline rather than ask her to do it again.
She outlived him by sixteen years.
Twenty-nine portraits and not one smile. She is still not moving, and the reason why is on the back of the mug.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.