In Portrait of Madame Cézanne with Loosened Hair, how is the Description discussed?
The work is oppressively flat and rectangular. While it lacks pictorial depth, it is highly symmetrical, showing a near full-face and centered body view, with a number of playful deviations, including the lean of her head and torso and the thick vertical line in the background which is positioned slightly to the left. As with much of Cézanne's mature work, it has many abstract forms, especially the vertical lines of her dress, which echo the diagonals of her hair and join the heavy line in the background on which her head seems to rest.The dress may be made of blue-black velvet upon which are added bands of gray satin; such striping shows up in several earlier portraits Cézanne painted of his wife. The manner in which it utilises costume and background to express tone and mood harks back to techniques used in portraiture during the early Netherlandish period, especially those by Rogier van der Weyden.
Art historian Liliane Brion-Guerry saw in the painting a delicacy absent from later portraits by Cézanne, in which individual expressiveness would give way to "icy hardness": "The face of Madame Cézanne conveys, even in its transcription, the delicate flutter of human emotion." Though criticized for her extravagances, she possessed "an even-tempered disposition and a tireless patience. When Cézanne couldn't sleep, she read to him in the night, sometimes for hours at a time."
left Rogier van der Weyden early Netherlandish