La Tranchée du chemin de fer

This is one of the first times Mont Sainte-Victoire appears in Cezanne's work, the pale ridge on the right that he would go on to paint dozens of times over the rest of his life. He made it around 1870 near his home town of Aix-en-Provence, in the same months that France stumbled into war with Prussia and Cezanne quietly kept clear of the fighting. The subject is oddly modern for a landscape: a raw railway cutting slashed across the middle distance, the new line to Marseille carving into the dry southern hills. On one side stands a garden wall and a house, on the other the bare mountain. Cezanne lays the land down in broad, blocky planes, already more interested in structure than in prettiness. The scar of the cutting keeps the whole view from settling into calm.