Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Les Lauves

A mountain he painted about eleven times from one hillside, dissolved here into a mosaic of color patches with the bare canvas left showing, the picture the next generation called the start of everything.

1. 1
   The mountain dissolving into the sky

   The peak, upper right, against the sky

   The summit is built from blue and violet patches whose edge does not draw a hard line against the sky but breaks up into it. The mountain and the air share the same touches of color, so the solid ridge and the empty sky are made of the same paint.
2. 2
   The gaps Cézanne left on purpose

   Small bare spots showing between the strokes, across the canvas

   Look for patches of unpainted canvas left showing between the color touches. Cézanne stopped before filling them. The picture is openly, deliberately unfinished-looking, and those gaps are a concrete thing you can point to.
3. 3
   A valley made of colored blocks

   The plain in the middle ground

   The fields, houses and viaduct of the valley are reduced to a mosaic of small green and ochre blocks. Representation is boiled down to color-architecture; you read “a plain with buildings” from an arrangement of patches, not from drawn detail.
4. 4
   The valley tipped up toward you

   The relationship of near ground to far mountain

   Try to find a single vanishing point and you cannot. Near and far are pulled into one shallow plane, so the valley seems to tip up toward you instead of receding correctly into depth. This flatness is the proto-Cubist move.
5. 5
   The picture as stacked bands

   Read top to bottom: plain, valley, mountain, sky

   The composition reads as horizontal zones stacked one above another, foreground plain, mid-valley, mountain, sky, like colored bands. That quiet banding is the scaffolding the whole picture hangs on.
6. 6
   Strokes that knit everything together

   The repeated parallel diagonal touches across the surface

   Cézanne’s constructive stroke, parallel diagonal marks, runs across unrelated things, a roof, a tree, the slope, and ties them into one continuous fabric of paint. The same brush-rhythm binds the whole landscape into a single surface.