 I'm Cindy Kang, associate curator here at the Barnes Foundation, and I'm going to be looking at a painting that we have in our main gallery right here. It's Madame Cézanne with green hat. So you can see it here on this wall. It's really anchoring this wall on the side of the doorway. So it's a pretty prominent painting in one of our most prominent rooms. And I thought it would be, it's one of my favorite paintings that I thought we would just dive in. So this is a portrait of Cézanne's wife, Marie-Hortense Fiquet. So who was she? Who is Marie-Hortense? So she was from a working class family in France. She met Cézanne in Paris in 1869 when she was working as a book binder and part-time as an artist model. So it was through her part-time job that she met Cézanne. And they soon got together, and they had a son named Paul in 1872. Now Cézanne was from a wealthy family in the South of France. His father was a banker, and he knew that they would not approve of his relationship with Hortense, and that if they found out, they might cut him off of his allowance. And that was really how he lived. He didn't live by selling his paintings. So he hid Hortense and their son Paul from his family for many years. So for example, when Cézanne would go down to Provence in the South of France to visit his parents for the summer, Hortense and Paul would just stay in Paris. Or if they did go down with him, they would stay in a separate apartment. So this is the way their relationship went for a while. They lived in separate residences often. They lived apart for long periods of time. And they actually didn't even get married until 1886, when Paul was already a teenager. But despite this estranged arrangement of their marriage, Cézanne painted Hortense nearly 30 times. So he made almost 30 portraits of her over the course of two decades. So she was his favorite model. She was his most frequent model, the person that he painted the most of all of his portraits. And I think in this way that these portraits attest to an exchange, or we can even say a collaboration between husband and wife. So here we see her seated on a green upholstered armchair with these scrolling arms. And she's wearing a pretty fantastic hat that gives the portrait its name. So let's look a little bit closer at this hat. It's got a wide brim, a tall crown trimmed with green leaves. And you can see it's a little bit transparent here and kind of reveals the top of her forehead. So it's a hat that doesn't have, as far as we know, quite an equivalent in contemporary fashion. I mean, the tall crown with the elaborate hat trimmings was quite fashionable at the time, but it doesn't quite correspond to anything that we can find in real life. And this fantastical kind of whimsical hat really contrasts with the rest of her outfit. You see she has this very tailored, structured, dark somber blue, you know, bodice. And it especially contrasts with her expression. She really kind of stares off rather sternly into the distance. She's thrusting out her lower lip, so she has this kind of dour expression on her face. And it's kind of interesting because you would expect someone who's wearing this kind of hat to be smiling and maybe to even be a little flirtatious. It's really quite a fashion statement of a hat, but Althons is definitely not doing that. And I find that there's actually a refreshing honesty in this portrait. So Cezanne was a painstakingly slow painter. He would take very long in between brushstrokes. So what you see here is kind of Althons annoyed and tired of sitting, and she's just sitting there waiting as her husband is painting her. And in this way, this portrait really disrupts the conventions of female portraiture. So she may be well dressed, but she's not smiling. She's not trying to be charming. She's not trying to be pleasing. This painting is very much actively resisting that expectation. So for a long time, scholars and most of the major scholars in art history in the 20th century were male. They really only had negative things to say or mostly negative things to say about Althons because she does look so unhappy or angry or bored in all of Cezanne's portraits of her. And so they found her incredibly off-putting. This is the same today when women are told to smile so that they are more pleasing and more approachable, make people feel more comfortable. Well, Althons is not doing that. But what Cezanne is doing here, I think, in presenting the blunt reality of his irritated wife and frustrating the expectations of female portraiture is to tell us that the meaning of the painting doesn't actually rely in her as the subject, that it's not in presenting her as the subject that we find the significance of the painting. He's deflecting us into looking instead at the paint itself. And it's really in the application of colors and in the interaction of form that we can find the meaning and the emotion of the picture. It's here that we can find some indication or some suggestion, some record of the intimate exchange between painter and sitter, between Cezanne and his wife. So let's zoom in and look at her expression. You really see the delicacy and vibrancy of the colors on her face, the way the pinks, the greens, the blues, the ochres dance across her features. Each stroke, each dab seems to suggest a passing emotion or a passing expression. It's as if her skin is this scrim across which the paint flickers to capture different moments. It's really lovely and incredible. But as resolved as her face is, her hands are the opposite. Let's take a look at them. So look how summarily these are painted. It's hard to tell which fingers are intertwined with which exactly. And here, look how bluntly and distinctly these different strokes of color are laid on. They very much are paint. They're not flesh. And what you're seeing here is that it's almost as if her hands are a blur of nervous energy that Cezanne is expressing movement. As if Althons was constantly moving her hands or twiddling her thumbs or rubbing her hands as she's sitting there, you know, waiting while her husband paints her. And this instability extends to other parts of the composition too. Let's zoom out and look at the whole composition. So you see, for example, in the arms of the chair, this arm is extremely elongated and this arm is somewhat truncated and foreshortened. You know, this is not a realistic portrayal of a chair in perspective. And if you look at the wall in the back, you see this kind of dark red-brown strip of wainscoting that doesn't match up on either side. So there's this instability of space, right? You don't really know where she is sitting in space, how the walls are matching up in that corner there, or they're not matching up at all. And then if you look at Althons' posture, it looks actually extremely uncomfortable, I think, because she's leaning way far to her right in this kind of awkward angle. Her body is a kind of S-curve that is then being contained by these other elongated curves of the arms by this kind of diamond shape that her arms form and that, you know, that the crown of the hat forms an apex for. So it's very interesting because all of these warped lines, these askew angles, do intersect and interact to result in a very balanced composition, right? Even though things are a little bit askew and off kilter, the composition feels stable. There is a resolved wholeness and calm kind of monumentality to it, but that still allows for the expression of all these passing sensations and all these ephemeral moments of emotion that pass between the husband and wife as she's sitting there. So today, Althons' role in Cézanne's work is thankfully being much more recognized, more fully recognized in publications and in exhibitions, because we can really see in this portrait that it's far more nuanced and complex, this relationship between Althons and her husband and her role in his work. It's really much more rich than scholars have previously allowed. Well, that's it for today's Barns Takeout. Thanks so much for joining. I hope you will be able to come and see this work in person. We are open at limited capacity with new safety measures, so please visit our website. Thank you. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barns Foundation.