LOCATION
Aix-en-Provence, France
The view of Mont St.-Victoire from “Terrain des peintres” (see map, street view) is the same angle, but higher on the hill, than the probable location Cézanne set up his easel. This photograph (© 2018 Daniel Edelman) is closer to the correct height. It was taken from a vantage not accessible to the public.
Oil on canvas
83.8 x 65.1 cm. (33 x 25 5/8 in.)
frame: 102.5 x 86 x 6.0 cm (40 3/8 x 33 7/8 x 2 3/8 in.)
L.1988.62.5
Estate of Paul Cézanne. [Ambroise Vollard (1867–1939), Paris, by ca. 1904]. Purchased (possibly from Vollard) by Sir Victor Schuster, London, by 1936 and sold by Schuster at Sotheby’s, London, 26 July 1939, lot 75, as The Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Chemin des Lauves; sold to Hoffmann, possibly a pseudonym. [Dalzell Hatfield, Los Angeles, by 1949]. Acquired by Henry Pearlman, by 1952; Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, after 1974.
Conservator’s Note
As in his other paintings, Cézanne kept his palette simple, using a limited number of pigments, which were usually applied pure with little overlapping of strokes. To lighten the value of certain colors, he simply added white lead.
Cézanne made more than thirty oil paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire from different vantage points, the first in 1870. Toward the end of his life, he often painted it from sites near his last studio, built in 1902 on a hillside road across the valley from the mountain. Nearly all of Cézanne’s views of Mont Sainte-Victoire are horizontal. Here, the vertical canvas accommodates a deeper landscape.
Luck plays an important part in collecting. I happened to be at a gallery when Cézanne’s great La Montagne Sainte-Victoire was offered to a New York collector. The…
Luck plays an important part in collecting. I happened to be at a gallery when Cézanne’s great La Montagne Sainte-Victoire was offered to a New York collector. The price was set, but the collector insisted on the dealer taking back an early painting by Cézanne as part of the payment, which the dealer refused to do. He then offered me the painting at the same price if I would pay him the money, without any trades, which I did. This painting is one of the most important, if not the most important, in my collection.
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Cézanne is recognized as one of the great innovators of late 19th- and early 20th-century art, whose work has influenced countless modern artists. With an introverted temperament and generally anti-establishment stance, Cézanne forged a new approach to painting that sought not only to reflect nature but also to express his own response to it. Although during his formative years he exhibited with the Impressionists, he ultimately felt at odds with their emphasis on fleeting experience, seeking greater solidity through painterly form and structure.
Born in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne studied drawing early on, but, fulfilling his father’s wishes, he later enrolled in university to study law. In 1861, however, he left for Paris, where he studied at the Académie Suisse and copied Romantic and Baroque art at the Louvre. Failing to gain entrance to the École des Beaux-Arts, and constantly rejected by the official Salon, Cézanne rebelliously painted in an intense, even violent, manner, with thickly encrusted paint. Finding a mentor in the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, in the 1870s Cézanne lightened his palette and started working directly from the landscape. He was influenced by the solidity of Pissarro’s brushwork and compositional structure, yet, like Paul Gauguin, whom he met in 1880, he sought to express his own personal perceptions and sensations through his views of nature.
By the late 1870s, Cézanne’s paintings showed increasing emphasis on mass and structure, and he developed a system of parallel brushstrokes, known as his “constructive stroke,” that conveyed the volume of both form and space. With mind and eye working in concert, Cézanne built up his pictures slowly and deliberately, often while directly confronting his motif, whether a landscape, still-life, or portrait. In Aix, the prominent form of Mont Sainte-Victoire became one of his dominant motifs from the mid-1880s until the end of his life. Attracted to its enduring geometric form and the changing views offered by different light and angles, Cézanne created more than thirty paintings in oil and watercolor that conveyed his intense examination of the subject’s underlying structures as well as the shifting nature of perception.
Cézanne used the medium of watercolor to experiment with form and structure, creating a wide range of effects through transparent planes of color and strokes of pencil. The exceptional luminosity of watercolor allowed him to play with light as a constructive element, while often using blank passages of paper to heighten the sense of space and form. Cézanne’s watercolors thus had a great influence on his oil paintings, seen particularly in his use of exposed areas of blank canvas as a constitutive element and passages that reveal open compositional structures, as exemplified in Route to Le Tholonet. Many successive generations of artists, from the Cubists and Fauvists to Abstract Expressionists, would be influenced by Cézanne’s experimental legacy.
