Mont Sainte-Victoire

In 1889 Paris was congratulating itself. The Exposition Universelle had just raised the Eiffel Tower over the city, and Impressionist painting was finally being taken seriously there. Cézanne was far to the south, in Aix-en-Provence, where he had grown up and where few thought of him as a modern painter at all. The limestone ridge he painted here, Mont Sainte-Victoire, rises east of the town, and he came back to it for the rest of his life. By the end he had painted and drawn it around 80 times. He wasn't chasing a passing effect of light the way his Paris colleagues were. He built the mountain out of small planes of colour, warm and cool patches set side by side until the slope stands as firmly as something built. That patient way of seeing is what younger painters would seize on 20 years later. The mountain still stands above Aix, the same pale wedge he could see from his family's land.