Mont Sainte-Victoire

The painting you're looking at now is Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne. Like The Bathers, this work was painted near Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne's hometown. Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain in the title, is a rocky mountain located in the Provence region. Cézanne painted more than eighty works featuring this mountain.

To create these paintings, he often climbed a small hill overlooking the landscape. Today, that spot is known as the Terrain des Peintres, or the Painters' Grounds. If you visit Aix-en-Provence, you can still go there. Panels displaying Cézanne's paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire have been installed at the site.

During the last twenty years of his life, Cézanne returned to this mountain again and again. If you look closely, you'll notice that not only the mountain but also the houses below it are simplified into geometric forms, such as rectangles and triangles.

This painting and The Bathers were created during roughly the same period. Together, they show how Cézanne constantly analyzed and reinterpreted the world around him through experimentation. At the time, however, this style was difficult for many people to appreciate, so his paintings were not especially popular. In the years that followed, though, Cézanne's analytical approach to painting became a major inspiration for artists such as Picasso and helped lay the foundation for modern art.

Take your time enjoying the painting.