La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue de Montbriand

A pale mountain rises over a valley of fields, and a railway viaduct crosses the middle distance. Cezanne first saw this view from a moving train, and it became the motif of a lifetime.

The story behind the painting

On 15 October 1877 the railway from Aix to Marseille opened. Half a year later, on 14 April 1878, Cezanne wrote to his friend Emile Zola praising Mont Sainte-Victoire, seen from the train as it crossed the bridge over the Arc River valley, as a beautiful motif. Around then, at thirty-nine, he began for the first time a series of paintings of the mountain above his native Aix-en-Provence, and Wikipedia calls it highly probable that the train window inspired them. This canvas was painted between 1882 and 1885, in his mature period.

What to look for

The mountain dominates the horizon, and far back, beyond the valley of the Arc, lies the town of Aix. Near the centre right you can find the very railway bridge of the Aix to Marseille line. Cezanne builds depth in layers, stacking a set of horizontal planes that pull the eye step by step into the view, from the fields to the viaduct to the mountain. The canvas measures about 65 by 82 cm, which Wikipedia counts among his smallest works.

Meaning and intent

Cezanne said his aim was to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of museums. This landscape shows that ambition: the light and colour of open-air painting, held together by firm structure. He returned to the same mountain many times, in Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bellevue, and pictures in London and Edinburgh. In 1989 this work was described as one of Cezanne's greatest.

Legacy

The painting belonged to the collectors Henry and Louisine Havemeyer. After Henry died in 1907 it passed to Louisine, and following her death in 1929 it went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of the Havemeyer bequest of 142 works. There it still lets visitors look along Cezanne's valley toward the mountain he made famous, and toward the bridge that may have started it all.