Artist Paul Cézanne Medium Oil on canvas | Year 1904-06 | |
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Location Princeton University Art Museum | ||
Mont Sainte-Victoire is a series of oil paintings by the French artist Paul Cézanne.
Description
The Montagne Sainte-Victoire is a mountain in southern France, overlooking Aix-en-Provence. It became the subject of a number of Cézanne's paintings.
In these paintings, Cézanne often sketched the railway bridge on the Aix-Marseille line at the Arc River Valley in the center on the right side of the picture. Especially, in Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley (1885–1887), he depicted a moving train on this bridge.
Only half a year after the opening of the Aix-Marseille line on October 15, 1877, in a letter to Émile Zola dated April 14, 1878, Cézanne praised the Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he viewed from the train while passing through the railway bridge at Arc River Valley, as a “beau motif (beautiful motif)”, and, in about that same year, he began the series wherein he tropicalized this mountain.
These paintings belong to Post-Impressionism. Cézanne is skilled at analysis: he uses geometry to describe nature, and uses different colours to represent the depth of objects.
