Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

The commanding presence of Mont Sainte-Victoire, jutting high above the plain to the east of Aix, Cézanne’s ancestral home, is the most prominent regional feature of the Provençal landscape. The rugged ridge line of this mountain’s looming slopes became an idée fixe in Cézanne’s creative imagination, a compelling motif to which he returned time and again throughout his career. The present watercolor is part of the last—and arguably the most important—series of landscapes Cézanne painted of this seminal subject.
“Cézanne was particularly absorbed by the Montagne Sainte-Victoire and the countryside over which it presides in the last few years of his life, and he depicted it with intensity and immediacy,” Philip Conisbee has written. “It concerned Cézanne’s identity, of course: he felt himself to be this pays d’Aix, that mountain. But it was also a matter of life and death: that is to say, the triumph of life over death, through an art powerful in its engagement with nature–a particular nature surveyed to its fullest advantage from the hill at Les Lauves–and an art dense in matter, rich in chiaroscuro, vibrant in color, passionate in feeling, and which endures in Cézanne’s signature motif" (Cézanne in Provence, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art Washington, D.C., 2006, pp. 289-290).
John Rewald has suggested that the present work is related to an oil painting of the same subject, Mont Sainte-Victoire, from circa 1897 (Venturi, no. 764), now located in the Detroit Institute of Arts. In his critical survey of the watercolors, Rewald explained, “What contributes to this different mood is that for the painting Cézanne had adopted a vertical format, whereas in this watercolor the more 'congenial' horizontal composition allows the motif to breathe more freely…The motif seems to have been painted from the vicinity of the terrace of Château Noir. Pale washes, predominantly blue and green, are applied over a very light pencil sketch. The outlines of the mountain, however, have been redrawn several times with the pencil and then delicately retraced with a thin blue brush line” (op. cit.).