Madame Cezanne in a Yellow Chair

Paul Cezanne · 1888–90

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

80.9 × 64.9 cm (31 13/16 × 25 9/16 in.); Framed: 106.7 × 90.2 × 11.2 cm (42 × 35 1/2 × 4 3/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair is one of the most quietly compelling portraits in Western art — a study in stillness where geometry and tenderness exist in the same breath. Cézanne painted his wife Hortense Fiquet more than twenty times across his career, returning to her as he returned to Mont Sainte-Victoire: not out of sentiment, but as a problem worth solving. In this 1888–90 work, the yellow chair anchors a palette of warm ochres, muted roses, and deep greens, with Hortense rendered in that characteristic Cézanne manner — forms built through layered, directional brushwork rather than blended transitions, giving the figure a sculptural solidity unusual for portraiture of the period. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this painting as one of its treasured Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, and it remains among the most studied examples of Cézanne's evolving approach to the human figure in interior space. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is made to order on canvas, faithfully replicating the original's colour relationships, the weight of the brushwork, and the quiet authority of Hortense's gaze — a piece that rewards close looking just as Cézanne's original does.