Mont Sainte-Victoire

English

Mont Sainte-Victoire: Paul Cezanne

Price: Price on Request
Art Type: Oil Painting
Size:
English Comments: 0
International Comments: 0
Creating Date:
Introduction and Works of Paul Cezanne >>

Contemporary-Art.org

Reproduction

Enlarge

Paul Cezanne Oil Painting - Mont Sainte-Victoire

Keywords: Mont, Sainte, Victoire

Work Overview: Mont Sainte-Victoire (Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bellevue; La Montagne Sainte-Victoire)
Paul Cezanne
Date: c.1895
Style: Post-Impressionism
Period: Final period
Genre: landscape
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 92 x 73 cm
Location: Barnes Foundation, Lower Merion, PA, US

Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bellevue is a landscape painting dating from around 1886, by the French artist Paul Cézanne. The subject of the painting is the Montagne Sainte-Victoire in Provence in southern France. Cézanne spent a lot of time in Aix-en-Provence at the time, and developed a special relationship with the landscape. This particular mountain, that stood out in the surrounding landscape, he could see from his house, and he painted it in on numerous occasions.[1]

Moreover, Cézanne depicted the railway bridge on the Aix-Marseille line at the Arc River Valley in the center on the right side of this picture.[2]

The painting shows clearly Cézanne's project of rendering order and clarity to natural scenes, without giving up the optical realism of Impressionism.[3] Both the light and the colours of the painting give the impression of a pattern that is not imposed on nature, but is there naturally.

It can be difficult to estimate, by eye, just how far away a mountain lies. A peak can dominate a landscape and command our attention, filling our eyes and mind. Yet it can come as something of a shock to discover that such a prominent natural feature can still be a long distance from us.

At 3317 feet (1011 meters) high, the limestone peak of Mont Sainte-Victoire is a pigmy compared to the giants of, say, Mount Fuji and Mount Rainier. But, like them, it still exercises a commanding presence over the country around it and, in particular, over Aix-en-Provence, the hometown of Paul Cézanne. Thanks to his many oil paintings and watercolors of the mountain, the painter has become indelibly associated with it. Think of Cézanne and his still-lifes and landscapes come to mind, his apples and his depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Steeped in centuries of history and folklore, both classical and Christian, the mountain—or, more accurately, mountain range—only gradually emerged as a major theme in Cézanne’s work. In the 1870s, he included it in a landscape called The Railway Cutting, 1870 (Neue Pinakothek, Munich) and a few years later it appeared behind the monumental figures of his Bathers at Rest, 1876-77 (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), which was included in the Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877. But it wasn’t until the beginning of the next decade, well after his adoption of Impressionism, that he began consistently featuring the mountain in his landscapes. Writing in 1885, Paul Gauguin was probably thinking of Mont Sainte-Victoire when he imagined Cézanne spending “entire days in the mountains reading Virgil and looking at the sky.” “Therefore,” Gauguin continued, “his horizons are high, his blues very intense, and the red in his work has an astounding vibrancy.” Cézanne’s legend was beginning to emerge and a mountain ran through it.

Copyright Statement:
All the reproduction of any forms about this work unauthorized by Singing Palette including images, texts and so on will be deemed to be violating the Copyright Laws.
To cite this webpage, please link back here.

>> English Comments >> Chinese Comments >> French Comments >> German Comments >>Report

Paul Cezanne

Work Overview