Mont Sainte-Victoire

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Mont Sainte-Victoire: Paul Cezanne

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Cezanne Oil Painting - Mont Sainte-Victoire

Keywords: Mont, Sainte, Victoire

Work Overview: Mont Sainte-Victoire (La Montagne Sainte-Victoire)
Paul Cézanne
Date: c.1902
Style: Cubism
Period: Final period
Genre: landscape
Oil on canvas
83.8 x 65.1 cm. (33 x 25 5/8 in.)
Location: Private Collection

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.

The painting appears unfinished, with a horizontal band in the foreground probably representing a field, but this seems unresolved. 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.

Critical Perspective
Mont Sainte-Victoire played an important role in the ancient history of Cézanne's native Aix-en-Provence. Its name refers to a Roman victory in 102 b.c. over Teutonic armies in the area.

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.

Mont Sainte-Victoire dominates the countryside near Aix, Cézanne’s home. It is the only such rocky protrusion in the region and is a prominent landmark from many vantage points. Cézanne and his childhood friends, including Émile Zola, developed an intimate relationship with this landscape, which they explored in their youth. At the same time, they were aware of the Provencal revival taking place, a movement that celebrated the region’s native language, arts, and cultural traditions. Mont Sainte-Victoire had a symbolic role in that narrative: it was the site of the Roman defeat of an invading Teutonic army—an event that became the stuff of legend as well as the source of the mountain’s name. Is it any wonder that Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire more than sixty times, even building a studio that afforded breathtaking views of the site?

When he was seventeen years old, Jeffrey Scheuer traveled through the south of France with his grandfather Henry Pearlman, visiting artists and the sites near Aix where Cézanne had painted. He remembers:

I have many memories that form a composite of who he was and his large place in my life. If one memory stands out, I think it was the summer of 1970, when I was in Aix-en-Provence as a student, ostensibly to study French with a group of kids from New York. But, actually, after a day or two of French classes we ended up renting motorbikes and biking around Aix-en-Provence all summer. The final week of the trip Henry showed up and drove around with me and showed me where Cézanne had painted. Took me to Le Tholonet and to le Mont Sainte-Victoire. He introduced me to Leo Marchutz, Sam Weyman, and a couple of his artist friends. He started talking to me about art, and that’s when it started sinking in. I have been back to Aix just once since then, just before 9/11. I was driving out to Le Tholonet with a friend, and I suddenly noticed the way the trees were arching over the road: it was exactly as Cézanne had painted them, and that was an amazing epiphany to me.

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