PAI 004          Painting         Paul Cézanne         1839–1906

Header image: The Garden at Les Lauves, 1906
Text I: Khan Academy, Text II: Dr. Ben Harvey

The Sainte-Victoire mountain near Cézanne's home in Aix-en-Provence was one of his favorite subjects and he is known to have painted it over 60 times. Cézanne was fascinated by the rugged architectural forms in the mountains of Provence. (...) He would use bold blocks of color to achieve a new spatial effect known as "flat-depth'' to accommodate the unusual geological forms of the mountains.

Cézanne would return to the motif of Mont Sainte-Victoire throughout the rest of his career, resulting in an incredibly varied series of works. They show the mountain from many different points of view and often in relationship to a constantly changing cast of other elements (foreground trees and bushes, buildings and bridges, fields and quarries). From this series we can extract a subgroup of over two-dozen paintings and watercolors. Dating from the very last years of the artist’s life, these landscapes feature a heightened lyricism and, more prosaically, a consistent viewpoint.

Montagnes-en-Provence, 1879