A studio on the hill

There is a limestone ridge that dominates the landscape around Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. It is called Mont Sainte-Victoire (mohn sant vik-TWAR), and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) painted it more than thirty times in oil, and dozens more in watercolor, across his life. It was the single motif (the subject he kept returning to across his career) he came back to more than any other. What follows is about the late, most radical group of those pictures, and about one canvas in particular.

In 1902 Cézanne built himself a studio on the rise of Les Lauves (lay LOHV), the hill just north of Aix, and moved his working life there. From the slope above the studio he had a sweeping view east across the plain to the mountain. That vantage gave him the last and most abstract group of Mont Sainte-Victoires: the ridge seen from farther back, the whole valley between flattening out into a field of color.

The painting in front of you is the version now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, painted in 1902–04, about 2 feet 4¾ inches tall and 3 feet ¼ inch wide. It is one of the most reproduced of the late Les Lauves canvases, and it sits among siblings: closely related versions hang in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the Kunsthaus in Zürich, and elsewhere. Cézanne painted the same view, over and over, chasing something the single picture could never quite hold still.

The canvas reads as broad bands of color stacked from bottom to top: greens and ochres for the plain and the valley below, then a band of blue-violet for the ridge and the sky above. In the upper part sits the mountain, whose outline will not quite hold, its edge dissolving into the same blue and violet as the air around it. And scattered all across the surface are small patches of bare canvas, spots Cézanne left unpainted, showing through between the strokes.