Rare Cezanne Portrait of his Wife to lead Sale of Works at Sotheby's New York

Spanning masterpieces of the late 19th century to pioneering examples of early abstraction and Expressionism, Modern Perspectives: The Collection of Rolf & Margit Weinberg includes important paintings by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Wassily Kandinsky, Edvard Munch, László Moholy-Nagy, and Egon Schiele.

Portrait de Madame Cézanne is a deeply personal portrayal of Paul Cézanne’s wife, Hortense Fiquet. Painted early in their relationship, this work is one of 29 portraits he executed of Hortense—of which 19 reside in major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation, and the Musée d’Orsay.

Created over a span of two decades, portraits of Hortense Fiquet chart the radical artistic innovations that mark Cézanne as one of the most important figures of art history. Fiquet served as the most frequent sitter for the artist’s portraits, other than Cézanne himself, and the sustained familiarity between model and artist resulted in a body of work considered among the most celebrated and emotionally charged portraits of the nineteenth century.

Revealing the intimate domain of the Cézanne family—a small fourth-floor apartment at 67 rue de l’Ouest in Montparnasse, Paris—Portrait de Madame Cézanne conveys the tenderness of their relationship during these years. Executed at a watershed moment in Cézanne’s practice, this work reveals a novel interplay of color and volume that not only endows Fiquet with a dignified presence and grandeur, but also ushers in a fully modern mode of portraiture that would influence generations of artists to follow.

Main Image: Paul Cézanne, Portrait de Madame Cézanne, circa 1877
Oil on canvas Estimate: $5,000,000–$7,000,000