Mount Sainte-Victoire

11. Paul Cézanne, French, 1839-1906. Mount Sainte-Victoire, c. 1894-1900. Oil on canvas, 71.5 x 92.1 cm. Bequest of Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., 1958.21

Lying to the east of his home in Aix-en-Provence, France, Mount Sainte-Victoire was a favorite subject of Paul Cézanne. He painted the mountain in a series of works from different angles, at different times, and in different weather. This view was painted at his studio on the hill of Les Lauves. In the 1880s Cézanne had painted less dramatic profiles of Mount Sainte-Victoire from the southwest side of Aix-en-Provence; the way the mountain towers over the landscape in this view suggests this version was painted later.

Although a founder of the impressionist group, Paul Cézanne's painting is very different from the styles of the other members. The momentary impression of a scene did not interest him. Instead, he was drawn to what he saw as solid and stable in nature. According to Maurice Denis, Cézanne once explained that he wanted to "make impressionism something solid and lasting, like the art in museums." Cézanne's painting is rooted in permanence. He rejected the undefined and sketchy brush strokes of the impressionists to portray nature in terms of concrete shapes of color. He reduces the scene to its most basic elements, stripping away descriptive detail.

By painting with larger areas of color, Cézanne took the pointillist or divisionist style of painting one step further. Every object in his painting is composed of large brush strokes of pure color. The trees in the foreground of the museum's Mount Sainte-Victoire are composed of geometric shapes of blues, oranges, reds, and greens. Another characteristic of Cézanne's paintings is the equal treatment of every part of his canvas. Not only is a flattened space created by the integration of the foreground and the background, but neither dominates the other. Instead, the tree in the foreground appears to merge with the image of the mountain in the background.

Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, where the future writer Emile Zola (1840-1902) was his boyhood friend. Cézanne's father was an exporter of hats until 1848, when he bought the only bank in Aix-en-Provence. Following his father's wishes, Cézanne attended law school, as did Zola, but neither was destined for the law; in 1858 Zola left for Paris to pursue a writing career and in 1861 Cézanne joined him to study art.

Cézanne met Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Renoir in 1863 when he exhibited at the Salon des refusés. In the 1870s he became Camille Pissarro's student at Pontoise, a town north of Paris, and began working in the impressionist manner. Under the guidance of Pissarro, Cézanne lightened his palette and turned toward a more objective approach to painting. He soon rejected the impressionists' flickering light to explore more solid forms of color. Mocked by the critics, by the public, and even by Zola (in his novel L'Oeuvre), Cézanne retreated to the town of L'Estaque, and then to a manor house on the outskirts of Aix acquired by his father, known as the Jas de Bouffan, the "Home of the Winds." There he would spend the rest of his life, concentrating on exploring the geometric structure in nature.

Vivian Kung and Patricia Richmond
Teacher Resource Center
Department of Education and Public Programs

© 1997 The Cleveland Museum of Art