Description
Road Before the Mountains, Sainte-Victoire – the mountain up close
On this canvas Cézanne does not set the mountain in the distance but lets it take up almost the whole upper half of the scene. Below it the valley spreads out in planes of orange, green and blue, with a road winding through. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this commanding view into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
A mountain turned into geometry
In the late versions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne does not describe the slopes but assembles them from slanting planes that overlap like roof tiles. The sky is blue in several different blues, not one. It is this method – space built from relationships of colour instead of from perspective – that has Cézanne called the father of modern painting.
The same subject, more than sixty times
Cézanne painted the mountain east of Aix-en-Provence in more than sixty oils and watercolours. He was not after the view but the task: how a flat canvas is to show mass and distance. Every version is an attempt, not a repetition.
What you see on the canvas
Trees and scrub in strong greens stand in the foreground, the middle is taken by the valley with scattered houses, and above rises the pale grey and violet mass of the mountain. The original is painted in oil on canvas and by the collection’s record measures 99 × 78 cm; it is dated to the beginning of the 20th century.
The division that saved the collection
This view of Mont Sainte-Victoire belongs to the group of Cézanne’s works that passed into state ownership after the Russian Revolution. In 1948 the museum in which they had been gathered was declared ideologically unsuitable and abolished. Rather than let the works disappear, curators divided them between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum – by some accounts precisely in order to preserve them. Because of that decision, Cézanne’s canvases from the former Moscow collections are today publicly accessible in the two largest Russian museums.
A mountain that fills a wall
This subject needs a surface on which the stroke stays visible – which is why we paint it by hand in oil on canvas and never as a print. It comes in ten sizes and to your measurements when you have one particular wall in mind. Because of the strong colour contrasts, leave it some empty space around it. Look at the frame in the 3D preview before you order. Among our hand-painted oil reproductions you will find other views of Mont Sainte-Victoire and its surroundings: Mont Sainte-Victoire, The Great Pine and Château Noir.
- Subject: Road Before the Mountains, Sainte-Victoire, Paul Cézanne, around 1900
- 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, each time as a fresh attempt
