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Lot Essay
Executed circa 1890-1895, Femme à la mante belongs to the rare oeuvre of Cezanne’s late watercolour portraits, in which the artist explores the relationship between line, colour, and structure with exceptional economy of means. Renowned for his landscapes, still life subjects, and bather compositions, Cezanne produced only a small number of portraits in watercolour, almost entirely toward the end of his career. Born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839 and dying there in 1906, he remained profoundly attached to the region throughout his life, a connection that underpins the intimacy of his late figure studies. In such works, Cezanne demonstrates a marked reluctance to fully articulate facial features, instead allowing character to emerge through pose, proportion, and the simplified architecture of clothing. In Femme à la mante, the figure is constructed through a network of tentative pencil lines, with animated accents of watercolour - visible in the hat, hair, and a central vertical note - serving to masterfully anchor the composition.
The sitter remains unidentified, yet the work aligns closely with Cezanne’s late practice in Aix-en-Provence, where he frequently turned to figures from his immediate surroundings, including local workers and neighbours. As noted by Christopher Lloyd, such sitters are not treated as types but convey a quiet dignity, shaped by the artist’s familiarity and restraint: ‘Cezanne’s late portraiture, therefore, is dominated by those people in Provence with whom he felt most at ease and with whom he was in daily contact…the sitters are certainly not to be designated merely as types and mostly they defy classification. Rather, as with Vincent van Gogh, they reflect the artist’s respect for the dignity of his fellow human beings’ (C. Lloyd, Paul Cezanne: Drawings and Watercolours, London, 2015, pp. 124–125).
Noteworthy is the work’s exceptional early provenance: it formed part of a group of 187 watercolours acquired from the artist’s son in 1907 by the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, and was subsequently included in their pioneering exhibition of Cezanne’s watercolours in Paris in 1909. The sheet later entered prominent private collections, including those of Dr Jacques Soubies and the Belgian collector René Gaffé, who was one of the foremost champions of modern art in the mid-twentieth century, thus further underscoring its importance within the history of Cezanne’s reception and the early appreciation of his works on paper.
The sitter remains unidentified, yet the work aligns closely with Cezanne’s late practice in Aix-en-Provence, where he frequently turned to figures from his immediate surroundings, including local workers and neighbours. As noted by Christopher Lloyd, such sitters are not treated as types but convey a quiet dignity, shaped by the artist’s familiarity and restraint: ‘Cezanne’s late portraiture, therefore, is dominated by those people in Provence with whom he felt most at ease and with whom he was in daily contact…the sitters are certainly not to be designated merely as types and mostly they defy classification. Rather, as with Vincent van Gogh, they reflect the artist’s respect for the dignity of his fellow human beings’ (C. Lloyd, Paul Cezanne: Drawings and Watercolours, London, 2015, pp. 124–125).
Noteworthy is the work’s exceptional early provenance: it formed part of a group of 187 watercolours acquired from the artist’s son in 1907 by the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, and was subsequently included in their pioneering exhibition of Cezanne’s watercolours in Paris in 1909. The sheet later entered prominent private collections, including those of Dr Jacques Soubies and the Belgian collector René Gaffé, who was one of the foremost champions of modern art in the mid-twentieth century, thus further underscoring its importance within the history of Cezanne’s reception and the early appreciation of his works on paper.