Description
Mont Sainte-Victoire – the mountain Cézanne painted all his life
Mont Sainte-Victoire is the limestone ridge that rises east of Aix-en-Provence and the most persistent subject in Cézanne’s work – he painted it more than sixty times. In this version from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a tall pine frames the scene, and a stone viaduct winds through the valley. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this Provençal view into your home, painted in oil on canvas in dry greens, ochres and blues.
The mountain as a testing ground
Cézanne did not return to the mountain for the view but because it set him a task: how to carry depth onto a flat canvas without falling back on aerial perspective and soft transitions. The solution you see here is a construction out of planes of colour – every stroke is at once a colour and a piece of space. It is this method that makes him one of the originators of modern painting; the Cubists cited him explicitly.
The pine, the viaduct and the valley of the Arc
The full title under which the Metropolitan records the work is Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley. In the foreground stands a large pine whose branches reach across the upper edge of the scene and frame it; in the middle ground you can make out the railway viaduct with its run of arches, then a novelty in the landscape. Cézanne did not hide it – on the contrary, he used it as a horizontal counterweight to the vertical trunk.
What you see on the canvas
The original is painted in oil on canvas and measures 65.4 × 81.6 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates it to 1882–1885 and holds it in the H. O. Havemeyer Collection as the bequest of Mrs H. O. Havemeyer of 1929 (inv. no. 29.100.64). Older literature sometimes gives a later date, around 1885–1887; here we follow the record of the museum that holds the work.
The bequest that introduced America to Cézanne
The line “H. O. Havemeyer Collection” beside this canvas is more than a museum formality. Louisine Havemeyer bought French modern painting on the advice of her friend, the American painter Mary Cassatt, who knew the Impressionists at first hand in Paris. On her death in 1929 she left the Metropolitan 142 paintings in memory of her husband – and it was those bequests that put Cézanne, then still little known in America, into the main hall of the country’s largest museum.
Provence in your room
We paint the mountain by hand, with a brush and in oil on canvas; print does not carry that materiality. Besides the ten sizes we will also paint it to your measurements – with panoramic subjects that is often worth doing. The bright greens and ochres lift even a north-facing room. Choose the frame with the help of the 3D preview in our app. Among our hand-painted oil reproductions you will find Cézanne’s other Provençal landscapes as well: Road Before the Mountains, Sainte-Victoire, The Garden at Les Lauves and Château Noir.
- Subject: Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley, Paul Cézanne, 1882–1885, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: Cézanne painted the same mountain more than sixty times
