Montagne Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine

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Montagne Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine: Paul Cezanne

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Paul Cezanne Oil Painting - Montagne Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine

Keywords: Montagne, Sainte, Victoire, Pine

Work Overview: Montagne Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine
Artist Paul Cézanne
Year c. 1887
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 67 cm × 92 cm (26.4 in × 36.2 in)
Location Courtauld Institute of Art, London

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 painting represented the Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Montbriant in Aix-en-Provance.

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.

In the catalogue for the 1910 London exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, the art critic and curator Roger Fry wrote that Cézanne ‘showed how it was possible to pass from the complexity of the appearance of things to the geometrical simplicity which design demands’.

So whilst Cézanne focused mainly on the landscape around his home town, he turns this landscape into a study of form and colour.

Whereas the Impressionists painted with thick, short brushstrokes, shimmering colours and no outlines, Cézanne used blocks of strong colour, prominently outlining forms such as the tree trunk and the fields in dark blue.

His interest in form and line is emphasised in the shape of the branches and the way in which they perfectly echo the outline of the mountain behind.

Cézanne’s simplification of the landscape could be interpreted as a return to an era of balanced, harmonious form rather than complex ornamentation, as well as a leap towards Modernism: the structured parallel brushstrokes that fragment the surface of the composition, as well as the bold colours, appealed to younger artists and paved the way towards abstraction.

In a 1904 letter to his painter-friend Émile Bernard, Cézanne famously claimed that nature should be treated in terms of three-dimensional geometric shapes.

Cézanne saw the purpose and effect of every aspect of his composition: horizontal lines created breadth and vertical ones suggested depth.

Whereas Renaissance painters had carefully concealed their under-drawing, leaving a highly finished surface that seemed to suggest that the painting was not in fact a canvas at all, but reality itself, Cézanne leaves many areas of his canvas roughly painted, with his sketchy outlines showing through: look in particular at the fields in the foreground.

Concerning colour, Cézanne wrote that blue created atmosphere, whilst yellows and reds reflected the play of light; he uses those colours here to suggest the warm, sunny climate of the southern regions of France.

Cézanne’s painting is as much about paint and canvas as it is about subject matter.

The peak of Mont Sainte-Victoire near Aix attracted Cézanne all his life. He identified with it as the ancients with a holy mountain on which they set the dwelling or birthplace of a god. Only for Cézanne it was an inner god that he externalized in this mountain peak--his striving and exaltation and desire for repose. In the painting in the Metropolitan Museum, the mountain comes less fully to view; its majesty is diminished by the foreground trees and the great extension of the valley at the right. The broader London picture renders the characteristic grandeur of the site, but also gives greater play, as I have said before, to the artist-observer and his turbulent mood. The stable mountain is framed by Cézanne's tormented heart, and the peak itself, through more serene, is traversed by restless forms, like the swaying branches in the sky. A pervading passionateness stirs the repeated lines in both. Even the viaduct slopes, and the horizontal lines of the valley, like the colors, are more broken than in the picture in New York. The drawing and brushwork are more impulsive throughout. Yet the distant landscape resolves to some degree the strains of the foreground world. The sloping sides of the mountain unite in a single balanced form the dualities that remain divided, tense, and unstable in the observer's space--the rigid vertical tree and its extended, pliant limb, the dialogue of the great gesticulating fronds from adjoining trees that cannot meet, and the diverging movements in the valley at the lower edge of the frame.

It is marvelous how all seems to flicker in changing colors from point to point, while out of this vast restless motion emerges a solid world of endless expanse, rising and settling. The great depth is built up in broad layers intricately fitted and interlocked, without an apparent constructive scheme. Towards us these layers become more and more diagonal; the diverging lines in the foreground seem a vague reflection of the mountain's form. These diagonals are not perspective lines leading to the peak, but, as in the other view, conduct us far to the side where the mountain slope begins; they are prolonged in a limb hanging from the tree.

It is this contrast of movements, of the marginal and centered, of symmetry and unbalance, that gives the immense aspect of drama to the scene. Yet the painting is a deep harmony, built with a wonderful finesse. It is astounding how far Cézanne has controlled this complex whole. If you wish to see his subtlety at work, consider only the bending of the tree which becomes perpendicular to the mountain's slope when it reaches the horizon. Or observe the rectangular and peaked forms of the house beside the trunk of the same tree.

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