Cézanne's Special Mountain
Paul Cézanne (b. 1839, d. 1906) had a lifelong affinity with the peak of Mont Sainte-Victoire. From childhood, Cézanne knew and loved the mountain that lies close to his birthplace of Aix-en-Provence in southern France, exploring its slopes with friends even as a young boy. As a young man he saw the peak daily from the family's nearby country villa. Throughout his life, Cézanne frequently returned to the Aix countryside, often inviting friends including Emile Zola. Later in life he rented his own cottage in the area and lived there for long periods. For Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire was something of a holy mountain - a source of inspiration, exhilaration and inner peace. He painted the peak at least 65 times, particularly during the last six years of his life, and canvases and watercolours of the mountain are now to be found in galleries throughout the world from New York to Zurich, from Tokyo to Paris. Cézanne had his favourite places for painting the mount, and one of these was the great Mediterranean pine tree we see in the Courtauld's version of Mont Sainte-Victoire (also known as La Montagne Sainte-Victoire au grand pin, Mt. Sainte-Victoire from the great pine tree). He even used the tree itself as the subject of other paintings.

Impressionism and More Besides
As a young artist, Cézanne was greatly influenced by the Impressionist painters, particularly Monet and Pissarro. His early paintings show a typical impressionist attention to light and colour; he began painting outdoors as Monet and Pissarro did, continuing to work "en plein-air" right up to his death. Nonetheless he always kept a certain distance from the Impressionists, in both social and pictorial terms, and is nowadays generally termed a Post-Impressionist painter. Cézanne himself refused to be labelled an Impressionist. He worked too slowly to catch fleeting impressions; he felt the importance given to light by the Impressionists exaggerated. He refused to shake off centuries of artistic learning, wanting to work painstakingly to create pictures that would stand the test of time. He developed a style without clearly-drawn outlines, refuting traditional modelling (giving shape to objects through shading) and using colour to give depth. Instead of using lines converging on a vanishing point in order to achieve a sense of perspective, he used planes of colour to provide breadth and depth. In his Mont Sainte-Victoire, for example, the foreground has darker colours, the low-lying land has strong greens and ochres and the mountain in the background has a mauve tinge. It is not lines but colours and tones that create the majestic grandeur in his painting.

The 1887 View of Mont Sainte-Victoire
Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire in the Courtauld Institute was painted after he had moved away from the original influence of Impressionism. His colours are stronger, and he is interested in geometrical shapes (neither shapes nor landscapes were of much interest to the Impressionist painters). He studied the geology of the area around the mountain, and aimed to give a durable sensation of the peak, rather than a vague impression. The confused greens and ochre colours of the low-lying land with alternating diagonals are a strong contrast to the more even, lighter but solid mountain at the centre of the painting. Cézanne has built up carefully-balanced patterns of shapes, and it is worth noting the way the tree bends almost to match the mountain slope and how the peaked roof of the house beside the tree-trunk mirrors the shape of the mountain in the distance. At close quarters we can see how Cézanne also uses a mix of horizontal and vertical brushstrokes to achieve his pictorial effects.

Pushing Ahead
Over the years, Cézanne further explored the ideas he was using for his Courtauld's painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire, developing them and taking them almost to extremes. Often he used the very same subject of the mountain, but he also experimented with portraits and later with scenes of bathers. In a much later picture of Mont Sainte-Victoire such as the version now in Philadelphia (1902-04), the colour planes are even more marked, the greens and ochres of the low-lying land contrasting sharply with the violets and blues of the peak and sky. This late painting also highlights how he has continued not only to take contrasts of colours to extremes but also to juxtapose light and shadow, warmth and coldness, vertical and horizontal directions - again the brushstrokes of the thickly-applied paint go in various directions, giving an extreme play of movement.

   
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (Philadelphia, 1902-04)

A New Dimension to Painting
From the 1870s onwards, the individual style of Cézanne with his quest for form and shape in painting as well as his use of strong, juxtaposed colour brought a new impulse to the art world. His approach to creating space was to be of extraordinary influence on artists such as Picasso and Braque, paving the way towards Cubism; his strong colouring also inspired artists such as Matisse and the Fauves. Although Cézanne scorned many of Monet's ideas, it is interesting to see how Cézanne, just like Monet with his many late paintings of the Rouen Cathedral façade, painted the same subject - Mont Saint-Victoire - over and over again in his later life as part of his quest to develop his ideas, his approach and his technique.