La Femme à la cafetière

An older woman in a blue dress sits stiff and serious beside a coffee pot and a cup, her working hands in view. Cezanne painted her as solidly as a still life, a quiet step toward Cubism.

The story behind the painting

Cezanne painted this oil on canvas, about 130.5 by 96.5 cm, between 1890 and 1895, in his years of maturity; Wikidata gives 1895. The sitter is probably one of the employees at the Jas de Bouffan, the Cezanne family house near Aix-en-Provence. As in his Card Players, the figure is deeply anchored in her setting. The sitter is an old woman with a closed face, wearing a blue dress. The painting now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.

What to look for

She sits indoors on something we cannot see, half sitting and half standing, dressed in blue, her face closed and severe. The article links this expression to the rustic, solemn Virgins of Piero della Francesca and to Renaissance busts. She seems a little surprised and awkward to be posing, yet she imposes her presence and her mystery. Behind her are the panels of a piece of furniture and, at left, the irregular flowers of a wallpaper. The whole figure fits inside a triangle, and her visible hands reveal a life of work.

Meaning and intent

Cezanne was not after an exact, photographic likeness. He was testing the laws of his own painting, building truth with his own means at the height of his constructive period. The strictly vertical lines of the objects at right play against the slightly tilted verticals of the background at left. The woman gives the same impression as the still life on the table, in a strict composition with simplified, geometric forms and multiple viewpoints that announce Cubism, in line with his own advice to treat nature through the cylinder, the sphere and the cone.

Legacy

The painting has inspired other artists. In 1989 Bob Wilson made a six-minute video work titled La Femme a la cafetiere, with Suzushi Hanayagi and Consuelo de Haviland, produced by La Sept and INA. The canvas was among the French works shown at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, and it appeared in the Cubism exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2018 to 2019, a sign of how firmly it is seen as a bridge between Cezanne and the art that followed him.