Marie-Hortense Cézanne

Marie-Hortense Fiquet Cézanne was the French mistress and later wife of Paul Cézanne, the Post-Impressionist and proto-Cubist painter of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She was a frequent subject of his drawings and paintings and is portrayed in 27 portraits.

When the artist met her in 1869, she was working as a bookseller. Fearful of offending his father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne, a well-to-do banker in Provence, and compromising his allowance, the artist went to great lengths to conceal his liaison with Fiquet and the existence of their subsequent child.

Fiquet and Cézanne married on 28 April 1886, in the presence of the artists' parents, though by that time the artist declared that he no longer had any feelings for his wife, whom one scholar has described as "a high-maintenance woman". After the death of Louis-Auguste Cézanne that same year, Cézanne and his wife separated, the artist moving in with his sister and mother and declaring, "My wife only cares for Switzerland and lemonade". They had one child, Paul (1872—1947).

Hortense Cézanne eventually moved to Paris. After her husband's death in 1906, she and her son sold the contents of Cézanne's studio to the dealer Ambrose Vollard for 275,000 francs. The settlement that Hortense Cézanne received from her son, who inherited his father's entire estate, she gambled away.