Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley

The Aix-to-Marseille railway had opened in 1877, and from a train window, where the line crossed the valley of the Arc river, Paul Cezanne caught sight of Mont Sainte-Victoire rising over the plain. He wrote to his boyhood friend, the novelist Emile Zola, that it was a beautiful motif. He was right: the mountain became the subject he returned to for the rest of his life. This is one of the earliest of those views, and among the most carefully worked. Near the centre the new railway viaduct crosses the valley, its row of arches recalling a Roman aqueduct, part of the very line that had first shown him the mountain from a moving train.