About this work
The grey-white limestone peak of Montagne Sainte-Victoire commands the canvas with a quiet authority that no photograph of the actual mountain quite matches. Cézanne's scenes generally included Mont Sainte-Victoire itself, a grey-white limestone mountain, and the surrounding valley and plains that the mountain rose from. The composition is organized in broad horizontal registers — earth, foliage, and sky — with the mountain anchoring the upper portion of the picture plane while the foreground breathes with loosely constructed patches of green and ochre. The paintings contain a relaxed gradation of greens, grays, and blues that imbue the series with a sense of peacefulness , and the brushwork — short, directional, and calibrated — does double duty, simultaneously describing terrain and building an almost tactile surface. Cézanne's use of light and color gives the impression that it is not his rendering of the landscape that gives it a fragmented quality, but that it is an inherent quality of the landscape itself.
Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings fell into two main periods: those executed during his so-called "period of synthesis," from roughly the 1870s to 1895, and those created during his late period, from around 1895 until his death in 1906.
The series was painted between 1882 and 1906, after Cézanne had become frustrated with Impressionism and sought "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of museums."
Cézanne, who had struggled through periods of great depression and doubt throughout his career, continued to paint, but shut off from the world — his depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire became a kind of public stand-in for the artist himself: inaccessible, distant, but nevertheless admired. The series is without precedent in Western art: "it was not just the composition of the Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings but also the very idea of a series of views of a specific mountain" that was remarkable — before Cézanne, no European had executed a long series of views of a single mountain.
The work'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.
As wall art, this is a painting for rooms that can hold a certain weight of stillness — a study, a high-ceilinged living room, a space where natural light shifts across the wall through the day. Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings are simultaneously "timeless" and "quiet" as well as "turbulent" and "ecstatic" — an unusual combination that makes the print equally at home in
