Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire
Cézanne returned to the mountain above his home town of Aix-en-Provence for more than twenty years.
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About the series
Mont Sainte-Victoire is a limestone mountain east of Aix-en-Provence, where Paul Cézanne was born and spent much of his life. From the 1880s until his death in 1906 he painted and drew it dozens of times in oil and watercolour, from different viewpoints around the town.
The earlier views, painted from the valley west of Aix near land owned by his brother-in-law at Bellevue, show the mountain across a wide valley framed by pine trees. In the last years he painted it from the hill of Les Lauves, above his new studio, in blocks of colour that build the landscape into planes. These late works influenced the Cubists. Versions hang in the Courtauld Gallery in London, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Most of the views are wide landscapes. An early view and a late one, side by side, show how far Cézanne took the subject.
