Mont Sainte-Victoire

By 1902 Cézanne had all but left Paris behind. He was in his sixties, back in Aix-en-Provence where he grew up, and that year he built a studio on the hill of Les Lauves, just north of the town. From its door he could walk a few minutes to a ridge and see Mont Sainte-Victoire across the valley, the limestone mountain he had known since hiking it as a boy with his schoolfriend, the writer Émile Zola. He painted it again and again in these last years, more than thirty times across his life. This is one of the largest versions. He kept enlarging the canvas to let the view spread further to the right and into the foreground, and the mountain here is built almost entirely from patches of green, ochre and blue laid side by side, the houses below barely more than blocks of colour. In October 1906 he was caught in a storm while working outdoors below this same slope, and died a few days later.