Painting Detail
Mont Sainte-VictoireArtist: Paul Cezanne
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 81x100.5 cm
Date: c. 1897/1898
Genre: Landscape
Source: Formerly in the collection of Bernhard Koehler, Berlin
Cezanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire tirelessly, from different points of view, and it dominates his later work. Looming over the outlying regions of Aix, the mountain most fully embodied for the artist the grandeur, simplicity and indestructibility of nature - everything that remained most important in his worldview. Usually Cézanne would paint Mont Sainte-Victoire from a more remote distance, taking the division into planes indicated by nature as a point of departure. However, in the present picture one plane elides with another, so that the eye, encountering no obstacle, quickly runs the whole distance up to the peak. The painting is notable for its lightness, a sense reinforced by both the details of the mountain cone and the pure line capturing its silhouette, as well as by the light rose colours from the morning sun.