ABSTRACT
The nearly 30 portraits of his wife that Paul Cézanne painted between 1877 and 1894 stand out for their sheer number, their striking variability (she rarely looks the same twice), and their contentious reception history. The only rival to Hortense Fiquet Cézanne’s primacy as her husband’s subject is the artist himself. For over a decade, she prevailed as the painter’s most significant Other.1 Yet, as Joseph Rishel (Cachin & Rishel, 1996) once observed, she has never been identified as the artist’s muse. In fact, historically she has been regarded as a veritable counter-muse, an unco operative helpmate who not only failed to provide sufficient inspiration for the artist, but actively hindered his achievement. She barely exists in the early accounts of the painter’s life in Aix-even when authored by someone who actually met her. Cézanne’s protégé Émile Bernard wrote a lengthy description of a dinner one evening in 1904 at the Cézanne family’s home, and gave a passing mention of “Madame Cézanne,” in the same way that one might notice but then immediately dismiss a servant. The enduring resistance to granting Hortense importance to her husband extends to an assumption about her lack of significance to his work (Doran, 2001, p. 26).
