Portrait of Madame Cézanne with Loosened Hair

Portrait of Madame Cézanne with Loosened Hair is an oil-on-canvas painting by Paul Cézanne, variously dated from the mid-1870s to the early 1890s. Although the model, his wife Hortense Fiquet, was not supportive and did not understand or take an interest in her husband's work, this is one of forty-four portraits in which she sat for him from 1869, a period during which she progressed from mistress, to wife, to ex-wife. Something of a socialite, Cézanne latterly found Fiquet often fickle and shallow, and once remarked, "My wife only cares for Switzerland and lemonade". The sensitivity and depth ascribed to her in this work is likely to be drawn from his own personality and projected onto her image. While elements of the work show the influence of Impressionism, it lacks the characteristic extroverted charm of that movement, and instead focuses on the inner life of the subject. It departs from the artist's previous portraits of his wife, whom he had earlier divorced, in its sensitivity, delicacy of tone and more relaxed countenance, as seen in the loosened fall of her hair.