Madame Cezanne leaning on her elbow FWN 432 1873/74 46cm x 38
Paul Cezanne painted 24 oil paintings in 1873; just one of them was a portrait – this one, of his partner, Hortense Fiquet Cezanne. Their great grandson, Philippe Cezanne, wrote for the exhibition “Cezanne and Paris” in 2012: “I cannot end this piece without paying tribute to the two people who were closest to Cezanne and of whom he was fondest: my great grandmother, Hortense, and my grandfather, Paul.” This Paul, Hortense and Paul Cezanne’s son, was born in 1872. Hortense (1850 -1922) was born in the village of Saligney, Besancon in the Jura; in the 1860’s the whole family moved to Paris to start a new life; but the urban Paris was just as tough a life for the poor as the rural Besancon: her sister passed away, and then her mother, when Hortense was 17. Her father returned to the Jura, but Hortense remained in Paris. She worked as a seamstress, and bookbinder- in those days these were not two separate occupations, for cloth-backed books required sewing. And in the evenings she did some modelling as well. She fled Paris for L’Estaque with Cezanne to escape the bloody slaughter of the Franco-Prussian war which ended in Paris, returning in peacetime with their little family to join Pissarro to the west of Paris in the village of Pontoise. 1873 saw the start of something new: a period of peace for France, as the country recovered from the end of Empire and civil war, and a period of bonding for the Cezanne family, in the gentle countryside of Pontoise and Auvers, and the simple and beneficent company of the Pissarro family.
Occasionally it happens that I am present at the gathering of a group of nursing friends, who all trained together nigh on forty years ago: they have all gone their own paths since those formative years at the London School of Nursing, and have led very diverse lives and had very different experiences; but they still remain a group of friends so close that even though they may only meet once a year or so, it seems they have never been apart! Such is the power of formative years together; especially when the formation is focused on understanding and appreciating the whole person.
And it is I believe, this depth of presence that Hortense and Cezanne experienced in their formative, bonding years in the early 1870’s. It would allow them through-out their lives to be at a distance but not apart; it would allow them to stay a family of three, dividing their resources equally but pursuing their own life paths; it would allow them to communicate deeply without saying much at all; it would allow them to respect each other as a person not because of a role or status.
In this painting, Hortense is twenty-three years old; her son is just a year old; she wears the dress she made herself a few years ago, before she gave birth. It’s a simple scene: times are hard – the family lives off a small allowance while her husband spends his time painting. Hortense sits upright, and resolute; Cezanne paints Hortense using green, brown, pink and red, but predominantly blue – Cezanne’s colour for spaciousness, and dignity.
John Berger, in the book accompanying the TV series “Ways of Seeing” of the 1970’s, suggests that in the history of European oil painting “a man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power that he embodies. If the promise is large and credible, his presence is striking…the object of his power is always exterior to the man. By contrast, a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself….men act, women appear! (woman) becomes an object of vision.” I believe Cezanne seeks not to represent Hortense as an object, but rather to give Hortense a presence that is her own.
For a few decades more, life would remain hard for Hortense as she kept her and her son hidden from all except Cezanne’s mother; only to be treated with suspicion when the whole Cezanne family found out. And she would continue to be treated harshly by subsequent art critics. It has taken till modern times for Hortense to receive any kind of truthful, non- sexist appraisal of her life with Cezanne: in 2002 Susan Sidlauskas is able to conclude her book on “Cezanne’s Other” with these words: “(Hortense) is however, indisputably, stubbornly, there, over and over….by being there, Hortense Fiquet Cezanne sat with her husband, and became his art.” I think they had a relationship not based on what they did, but who they were, as whole independent persons.
“When I encounter a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to her, then she is not a thing among things nor does she consist of things. She is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, nor a loose bundle of named qualities. She is Thou and fills the firmament.”
Martin Buber