Mont Sainte-Victoire

Mont Sainte-Victoire, oil painting created in 1902–04 by French artist Paul Cézanne, one of more than 80 works in which he portrayed the limestone mountain ridge. This rendering was one of his later and more analytical such studies.

At the heart of Cézanne’s ambitions for painting was the desire to reveal nature in its most rudimentary and elementary form. Often this meant depicting a landscape, still life, or figure study in an abbreviated manner. Mont Sainte-Victoire can be read in this way, as a series of decisions committed to the canvas only when the artist was sure that there was some fidelity between the form seen and its corresponding inscription.

Cézanne had known and climbed this mountain in the south of France near his hometown of Aix-en-Provence since he was a child. In adulthood up until as recently as 1895 he occasionally retraced his steps, continuing to follow the trails that ascended the mountain. He first painted the mountain in 1870, although in these early studies it was only one of several elements within the overall landscape. From 1882 onward the mountain came to dominate his paintings of this region.

With this study, Cézanne’s brushstrokes, while remaining discrete, cohere as a whole. Although the mountain occupies only the top-third band of the composition, it remains set apart from the houses and the largely undifferentiated treatment of foliage in the foreground by the artist’s use of the same range of blues to depict both mountain and sky. Mont Sainte-Victoire’s reduction of nature into essential units not only denotes the degree of visual scrutiny and exactitude that Cézanne brought to the subject, but also anticipates the experiments with form, perception, and space later carried out under Cubism.