[1] In most of the other portraits Hortense Fiquet is presented in more formal attire that perhaps reflects the importance she ascribed to fashion; it is said that an appointment with a dressmaker caused her to be late to her husband's deathbed in 1906.

While it lacks pictorial depth, it is highly symmetrical, showing a near full-face and centred 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.

[9] 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.

[1] 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,[9] especially those by Rogier van der Weyden.

Based on its style, John Rewald wrote that it was made in the early 1890s; the fuller form of the face may indicate a later date when Madame Cézanne would have been in her forties.