Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine

Painted around 1887, this work belongs to the long series of canvases Cézanne devoted to Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain in Provence in southern France. He spent much of that period in Aix-en-Provence, his hometown, and developed a close connection with the landscape around it. In a letter to his friend Émile Zola, written in April 1878, he described the mountain as seen from the window of the train between Aix and Marseille as a beautiful motif. The letter came about six months after the railway line opened, and it has been suggested that the view from the train may have prompted him to start the series, though this remains a likely explanation rather than a documented fact.

The painting shows the mountain as seen from Montbriand in Aix. Toward the centre right stands the railway bridge on the Aix-Marseille line over the valley of the Arc River, a modern element that sits within the landscape without taking it over. The large pine of the title occupies a prominent place in the foreground and provides a vertical counterpoint to the horizontal mass of the mountain. Cézanne builds his forms from patches of colour rather than from a strict linear perspective, organising the scene through the relationships between volumes and tones, an approach that would shape much of his later work.

The landscape has also had an afterlife. Herman Braun-Vega's triptych Une affaire de pommes n°2 (Cézanne), from 1970, shows this view through its windows, paying tribute to Cézanne as a creative father of several later artistic movements.

Painter

Paul Cézanne

Date

1887

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

67 × 92 cm

Museum

Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Genre

landscape painting

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