(1839-1906)
Mont St. Victoire
Mont St. Victoire, near Aix-en Provence, is a subject that Cezanne revisited many times from the early 1880s until his death. In all these paintings he combines a remarkable faithfulness to what he observed with a deep awareness of his emotional responses – a skill that he achieved only after much hard work and rigid self-discipline.
Cezanne did not attempt to represent a superficial imitation of the landscape; rather, he intended to create work that would be both beautiful to look at and the artistic equivalent to what he himself had seen and felt in front of nature.
Around the fixed framework of the tree and certain key points such as the buildings, Cezanne appears to be measuring distances and angles, each mark corresponding to something seen in the landscape itself.
Cezanne never allowed himself to become an impassive eye. In the sensitively modulated color and the gentle movement of the brushstrokes he reveals a strong, though controlled, emotional response to his subject.
There seems to be a restless motion in the branches of the pine tree, and the mountain is fuller and larger than in real life. After the death of his father in 1886, Cezanne grew in artistic maturity and increasingly allowed his emotional response to assert itself.
Cezanne’s landscapes often took him weeks or months to complete. The difficulty was that the detail was always changing as the light changed – and even as Cezanne moved his position. In other words, there never came a moment when he deemed the work to be finished. This is one of the reasons for his sense of failure and the reason why he rarely signed his work.
This work was so admired by a young poet, Joachim Gasquet, that Cezanne gave him the painting, adding his signature as a sign of friendship.