Paul Cézanne's Montagne Sainte Victoire

Cézanne was born and raised in Aix-en-Provence, inland from Marseille and southern France, and the landscapes of the region around Aix become absolutely central to his art. And dominating that landscape is the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the extraordinary rocky ridge to the east of the town. Cézanne viewed it from many different angles during his career, From his youth right through to the very last works he executed. The Courtauld picture was probably painted around 1887 And shows the valley between the mountain and his vantage point to the west of Aix-en-Provence, Looking out across a wide space to the mountain, Which is actually about eight miles away. But he manages to orchestrate that space by an extraordinary sequence of colors, working through the soft greens and beige of the foreground A delicate perspective that leads us almost imperceptibly to the soft blues and roses that we see on the mountain, creating a sense of atmospheric space. But at the same time the composition is extraordinarily tightly structured, framed by the tree and by the branches across the top of the picture. It leads our eye in with enormous care into the distance and also creates a sense of monumentality on the picture surface itself. The brushstrokes were extremely varied. In certain places the paint is handled quite broadly and thinly. At other points there are individual strokes that create a sense of texture and movement, both in the foliage at the top and down in the bushes at the bottom left. And also the way he orchestrates the color is very, very carefully modulated. There's an extraordinary little red stroke on the roof at the bottom center, which acts as a kind of pivot, leading the eye from that red stroke to other warm points up the composition, set off against the dominant greens and blues of the rest of the landscape. And this indicates just the way in which he tried to create something immensely coherent in this picture, what he called in a later letter his harmony parallel to nature, which was what his artistic project was all about.