Mont Sainte-Victoire rises above the Provençal plain, fields and houses reduced to planes of green, yellow and violet. Cézanne painted the mountain dozens of times in his later years; built from patches of colour, this version stands on the threshold of abstraction.
Key facts
- Artist
- Paul Cézanne1839–1906 · French
- Date
- 1902–04
- Period
- Post-Impressionism1886–1905
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 73 × 91.9 cm
- Location
- Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia, United States
Actual size
Compared with an adult 170 cm tall
Palette
#606246#2E321E#7C7E83#9D9FAA#9D995DBackground
Mont Sainte-Victoire lies east of Cézanne's home town of Aix-en-Provence and is the region's landmark. He painted it in more than forty oils and about as many watercolours, making it his most important motif.
In 1902 Cézanne built a studio on the Lauves hill north of Aix, from which he could see the mountain. In his last years he went out almost every day to paint from nature, until he collapsed while working in a storm in 1906 and died a few days later.
Technique & composition
Cézanne laid down colour in square, block-like strokes, each a small plane. The fields, trees and houses of are reduced to patches of colour that overlap and interlock, forming a space both flat and deep.
He conveyed distance not with linear perspective but with warm and cool colour: warm greens and yellows in front, cool blues and violets for and , which naturally recede. Greens from the land recur in the sky, fusing heaven and earth.
Details
Symbolism
The permanent structure of nature
The Impressionists captured fleeting changes of light; Cézanne sought the enduring structure beneath nature. He wanted “to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums”.
The painter's sacred mountain
For Cézanne the mountain was not just scenery but a lifelong quest, a goal he could never fully grasp, a symbol of the endlessness of artistic pursuit.
Stories
- Did you know?
“The more I look at nature, the further I feel from my goal,” Cézanne said. A month before his death he wrote that he was still studying nature.
- Did you know?
Cézanne's last studio in Aix is preserved and open to the public, with his belongings still as he left them.
Legacy
The late Mont Sainte-Victoire series is seen as the bridge to Cubism and abstraction. Picasso, Braque and Matisse were deeply influenced by it, and Cézanne came to be called the father of modern art.
