Portrait of Madame Cezanne FWN 488 1888/90 47 cm x 59 MO
This portrait of Hortense Fiquet Cezanne is one of a set of three, one including her hands on her lap (FWN 487), and the other down to just above her hands (FWN 489). For me, this is the least worked, and the most developed: it’s realization, and complexity, is in its simplicity. The three distinct areas of colour – Hortense’ blue-green dress, the mustardy wall behind Hortense to the upper left, and the lighter blue wall behind Hortense to the upper right – are full of movement: the ruffling collars of the dress and the front fraught frilly seam – flowing in short vertical waves; the mustardy area above her left shoulder (where you can just make out some of the wall-paper), flows in by her hidden ear, and out again to the left of her parted hair - undulating like the sea; on the other side, the darker blue colouring of Hortense’ shadow, all the way down her head, neck and shoulder, has the effect of giving depth to the lighter blue, like cumulous clouds in a squally sky..
In the midst of all this movement, there is a presence, simple and serene, structured and still, silent and focused – presence in her own space, not confined nor over-extended, just there, in the moment.
I hadn’t realized before I started to do some research for this blog that the Cezanne family had gone to Switzerland – well, towards Switzerland – twice, at least: you immediately think of Cezanne’s Le Lac D’Annecy – but that visit was in 1896. They spent an extended period (some four months) near Besancon, in Emagny, in 1890. Hortense was born just 25k away in Saligney. Her father had brought the family to Paris after their mother had died when Hortense was a teenager, but it had not worked out. He took the family back to Saligney, but Hortense stayed in Paris, working as a seamstress during the day and as an art model in the evenings. That’s how she had met Cezanne. There was a popular song around, about a model and mistress of a ‘rapin’ (the name given to the cashless painters of Montmartre), which contained this quatrain -
"Painting is beautiful but it's sad
because it lacks a bit of essential.
Don't rely on an artist
to furnish yourself at Dufayel.”
The Grands Magasins Dufayel was a huge department store with inexpensive prices built in 1890 in Goutte d’Or, a very poor working-class district in the northern part of Paris, just east of Montmartre, run by Georges Dufayel. It was not so much one department store, as a ‘shopping retail park’: all kinds of shops gathered in one complex around a central square. As well as food and grocery outlets, clothes and furniture shops, there was a theatre, a cinema, a gramophone and X-ray display centre, cafes and bars – it was designed to be the social centre of this new, urban, space. It was adorned lavishly with statues and fountains, seating areas and promenades.
I think that it was perhaps this development that, a generation later, inspired the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre to write his book about “the critique of everyday life”. He would propose that each era of human existence produced its own ‘social space’, reflecting the values of that society. So, just as the Greeks had the ‘ekklesia’ or gathering around the Acropolis, so too modern urban society now had the central square of the great shopping retail parks: the space for social interaction, where the values underpinning the mode of production were celebrated and re-enforced.
Hortense’ father passed away in 1889; and I’m sure that she spent those months in Emagny mourning his passing with the rest of the family, and generally sorting out family affairs. Hortense sent a fairly long and fluent letter on 1st Aug 1890 to Marie Chocquet, who was married to Victor and lived in Normandy. Hortense concludes: “We hope that next year, we will have the pleasure of seeing you both in Switzerland”.
The new Dufayel Store provided lots of opportunities for young women to work in better jobs than traditional women’s work like Hortense had done when younger; the social interaction, the novelty and the size of the Dufayel was a real positive; but the pay was low, and the hours were long. It was this tension that Lefebvre pointed to in his understanding of everyday life, which he defined as the intersection of "illusion and truth, power and helplessness; the intersection of the sector that man controls and the sector he does not control".
Dufayel had the bright idea of introducing a scheme to extend credit to the urban working class: you could access credit by paying 20% of the cost of the item and agreeing to repay the rest (with interest included, of course) in regular instalments. Dufayel had a squad of 800 ‘investigators’ whose task it was to nip along to the home of the prospective borrower while the deal was being arranged and interview the landlord about the ‘credit-worthiness’ of the family. Once agreed, it was the task of the ‘investigators’ to collect the payments on the due dates. As part of their task, the investigators collated lots of information about their clients, and eventually were able to produce ‘databases’ which Dufayel would use for advertising and product development.
The scene was set to encourage the working poor, and furnish them with the means, to engage together in the ‘urban space’ in which they were squeezed. It would be a few generations yet before ideas would crystalize about who exactly held the right to the space in which the working poor were squeezed– was it part of a common right or in private ownership?
“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”
David Harvey Economic Geographer, aged 85.
Postscript
Before any letters written by Hortense were discovered, the art critics of the day assumed she was illiterate. And then, well, like it says in the song, she made her living by being a model and a mistress…where-as, we discover, she was a seamstress, and seems to have gone back to her birthplace to manage the family affairs, and family property. Later, some of the Impressionist circle called her ‘Le boule’, and her son ‘le petit boule’; and so, later critics inferred that she was rather plump, a dumpling, and a bit ‘slow’. But in fact, as we see from this painting when she was forty, she was tall and slim. And, even later still, after Cezanne had passed away and his paintings were sought after, and could demand a high price, she was accused of not appreciating them because she sold most of them: but it must be quite difficult to hang 1000 oil-paintings in your front room!
Indeed, this painting, her own portrait, was bought by Matisse (via Paul Cezanne junior) and he proudly displayed it in his rather large and full, front room in Nice!
The reunion of the Cezanne and Chocquet families in Switzerland did not happen: Victor had by the next year, sadly passed away. But I’m sure that Marie and Hortense continued to be good friends and met up many times in the new urban spaces springing up in Paris.
Henri Matisse in Nice 1932
Portrait of Madame Matisse 1905 Henri Matisse