The Painter and His Mountain: Paul Cézanne and Mont Sainte-Victoire

For some, a muse can be a person; for others, like Paul Cézanne, it can be a mountain. Mont Sainte-Victoire, near Aix-en-Provence in southern France, drew the celebrated artist for decades and inspired more than 30 canvases and watercolours.

Although the mountain itself is not tall, standing at about 1 km in height, it looms in the local imagination almost like a mythical being. For Cézanne, who spent most of his life in Aix and later set up a studio in a nearby village with a view of the mountain, it was a symbol of nature's beauty and permanence.

This landscape first appeared in his work in the 1870s, in a painting titled "The Railway". It later served as the backdrop for "Bathers at Rest" (1876), and by the 1880s it had become the central subject of his work. Yet no matter how many times he painted this landscape, every one of Cézanne's works contains unique details, and the mountain is depicted differently each time — further proof of the artist's love for this place.

"Bathers at Rest" (1876), Wikimedia Commons

The Mountain's Timelessness

It is only natural that Cézanne's mountain landscapes are often compared to Claude Monet's series of haystacks. While there are certainly similarities — both artists were interested in light and in the possibilities offered by a single subject — their approaches were entirely different.

Monet, one of the few painters Cézanne genuinely admired, was determined to capture the impression of a single day. To finish a painting, he would often work from dawn until dusk. Cézanne, by contrast, often worked on his Mont Sainte-Victoire canvases over the course of an entire year, returning to them again and again, seeking to capture the mountain not at a specific time or season, but in a timeless space. What mattered to him was stability and permanence. He sought to remove any distraction that might draw the eye away, so that nature could speak for itself. And within this timelessness — and, at once, this eternity — permanence and change, strength and flexibility, find their place. How did he manage this? In the artist's late works, the mountain looms before the viewer's eyes like a cone tilted to one side; nothing extraneous distracts our gaze; the image is built from small, flat patches of colour that convey no sense of movement or flow, and the scene appears entirely still. The individual patches of colour bear no resemblance to the objects they depict — only their relationship to one another allows us to recognise the reality we know. "Nature is not a surface, but a depth. And colours are the surface expression of that depth. They grow from the roots of the world. They are its life force." For Cézanne, colour is the sole constituent element of a painting. The boundaries between colours are the boundaries between objects and forms. Light does not exist on its own in his paintings; it is created through colour: "You cannot recreate light — you can only depict it using something else: colour." Thus Cézanne rendered the strongest, brightest light in the brightest colours, and shadows in light and dark tones.

"Mont Sainte-Victoire", 1902–1904, Wikimedia Commons

The Influence of Japanese Woodblock Prints

Katsushika Hokusai, "Fuji from Gotenyama", from the series 'Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji', 1831

One feature unites all of Cézanne's depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire: a bird's-eye view, which most art historians believe was inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints, which were extremely popular in France at the time. More specifically, this approach to perspective was most likely influenced by Utagawa Hiroshige's 19th-century woodblock series "The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō". It is likely that Cézanne was introduced to Japanese art by his mentor, Camille Pissarro. It is also known that Cézanne himself studied contemporary books about the Japanese artists Kitagawa Utamaro and Katsushika Hokusai. The parallel between Hokusai's "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji" and Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire series is clear. They are alike not only in how they depict the mountain, but also in that both form a series of views of the same mountain. No European had done this before Cézanne. Yet Cézanne's approach cannot be said to be exactly the same. Indeed, while ukiyo-e prints are inherently dependent on line and contour, Cézanne, working with patches of colour, abandons line altogether

The Mountain Became an Inseparable Part of the Artist and His Legacy

"View of Mont Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves", 1902–1906, Wikimedia Commons

Most of Cézanne's landscapes featuring Mont Sainte-Victoire were painted in the final years of his life: between 1902, when he set up his studio in Aix, and 1906, when he died. By then, the artist once rejected by the Salon was already being called one of the greatest painters of his generation.

At the same time, however, Cézanne began withdrawing from public life and, as time went on, lived more and more like a recluse in the hills (aside from visits from other artists). As the living legend of the artist grew, so too did his association with the mountain itself — not without the artist's own help, it must be said. Contemporaries recall him once exclaiming: "Look at Mont Sainte-Victoire — what energy, what a powerful thirst for the sun, and what melancholy in the evening, when it settles upon the earth with its full weight... These masses were forged by fire. And fire still smoulders within them."

Although plagued throughout his career by severe depression and periods of doubt, Cézanne kept painting, even as he shut himself away from the world — and so Mont Sainte-Victoire became, in a way, the artist's representative in public life. Both distant, unreachable, yet still capable of inspiring wonder.