Portrait of a Woman (Portrait de femme)

Portrait of a Woman (1892) at the Barnes Foundation is one of Cézanne's figure paintings from the early 1890s in which his structural method was applied to the human face and figure with increasing confidence. Anonymous female models—like his wife, local women from Aix-en-Provence—sat for Cézanne as motifs equivalent to his landscape and still-life subjects. The face is analyzed as a three-dimensional structure of color planes rather than a psychological subject. Critics have noted Cézanne's portraits as foundational for the twentieth century's move away from psychological portraiture toward structural figure painting.

The face is modeled through adjacent color patches of warm flesh, cool grey, and muted ochre. No feature is defined by outline alone; each plane of the face—forehead, cheekbone, jaw—is identified through a directional color patch. The background is summarily indicated in loose horizontal strokes, allowing the face structure to dominate.