Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct from the Valcros Side

In October 1877 the railway from Aix-en-Provence to Marseille finally opened, and to carry it across the valley of the Arc river, engineers had built a stone viaduct of 38 arches. Cézanne walked and painted the hills around Aix for years, and here the new viaduct is simply part of the view, a low row of arches glimpsed between the pine trunks, with the pale slopes of Mont Sainte-Victoire behind. The date is uncertain. Cézanne's son later noted it as painted in Aix in 1886, while the catalogue raisonné places it around 1890. The canvas hung at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1904, and on 4 May 1906 the Moscow merchant Sergei Shchukin bought it from the dealer Ambroise Vollard, a few months before Cézanne died. Shchukin's collection was nationalised in 1918, and the painting has been at the Pushkin Museum since 1948.