Description
Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibémus – the canvas two sisters from Baltimore bought
In the foreground stand ochre blocks of the quarry, cut into flat faces, with low green scrub growing on them; at the right a pine rises the full height of the canvas on a thin dark branch. Behind the quarry lifts the grey-blue mass of Mont Sainte-Victoire with its sharp ridge, and above it a blue sky. This hand-painted painting on canvas reproduces Cézanne’s work of about 1897, which measures 65.1 × 81.3 centimetres in the original and is held by the Baltimore Museum of Art under the inventory number 1950.196.
Claribel and Etta Cone
The museum record for this canvas does not end with the name of the institution: it names the Cone Collection, formed by Dr Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore. Claribel Cone (1864–1929) trained as a physician, Etta Cone (1870–1949) as a pianist. Between 1906 and 1949 they acquired more than seven hundred works by Henri Matisse, and their collection grew to some three thousand objects. This canvas was bought on 2 July 1925 by Claribel. The collection came to the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1950 by Etta Cone’s bequest, and the wing named after the sisters was dedicated on 23 February 1957.
From Vollard to Baltimore
The first known owner was the dealer Ambroise Vollard in Paris. After him the canvas went to the Paris collector Maurice Gangnat, who also lent it to exhibitions. At the sale of the Gangnat collection the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune took it, and a week later Claribel Cone. In 1950 it passed to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it carries the number 1950.196 – the first two digits give the year the museum received the collection.
Seven days from the saleroom
The dates in the provenance sit unusually close together. On 25 June 1925 the canvas was sold at the Gangnat collection sale at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris as lot 162, and the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune took it the same day. By 2 July 1925, seven days later, it stood in the name of Dr Claribel Cone in Baltimore. Between a Paris saleroom and an American collection, one single week passed.
Bibémus – the place in the title
The catalogue raisonné names Bibémus among the locales for this canvas, and among the natural motifs Mont Sainte-Victoire, the pine, rocks and trees. Bibémus is a quarry east of Aix, and the title says the view of the mountain is taken from exactly there: not from open country but from among cut walls. That is why the foreground is so unusual: what elsewhere would be meadow or field is here blocks of ochre stone left behind by the digging, and the colour of that stone is the ground colour of the whole work.
How the rock is built
The stone is painted as a series of flat, almost rectangular faces set one beside another; a single stroke often covers the whole wall of a block, so that the rocks read as masonry rather than as natural fracture. The green, by contrast, is laid on in short round touches. The mountain behind is made of the same faces as the quarry, only in grey-blue, and it is because of this that foreground and summit seem one body seen twice. In Vollard’s stockbook the canvas is entered at number 3479 as “oil; in the foreground blocks of red rock on which green shrubs grow, in the background the mountain Ste Victoire”, with the measurement 65 × 81 centimetres and the price of 200 francs beside it.
First shown as “the rocky mountain”
In October 1907 the canvas was in the Cézanne retrospective of the Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais in Paris as number 39, under the title La Montagne rocheuse, the rocky mountain; Gangnat lent it. After it reached Baltimore it was shown in 1949 in a selection from the Cone Collection, in 1950 and 1951 in Philadelphia in the Diamond Jubilee exhibition as number 86, in 1951 in Baltimore again, and in 1952 in Chicago as number 108, from where it travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
This is a bright, wide landscape with a strong horizontal run, and it therefore carries a large wall and some distance – above a sofa or in a hallway, where it can be seen from across the room. We paint it in fifteen sizes, from 50 × 40 to 180 × 143 centimetres, intermediate measurements we stretch on a made-to-measure stretcher, and how it will look on the wall is shown in advance by our 3D application. The same motif carries Mont Sainte-Victoire, and from the country around Aix come Jas de Bouffan, The Pond and Poplars.
- Subject: Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bibémus, Paul Cézanne, about 1897, Baltimore Museum of Art
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: from a Paris auction to an American collection the canvas took seven days, between 25 June and 2 July 1925
