Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bellevue

Cézanne painted this view of Mont Sainte-Victoire in the early 1890s from a low rise near the little Bellevue railway station outside Aix-en-Provence, his home ground. The mountain is one he returned to more than 30 times across his life, but this canvas has something the postcard views leave out. A tall pine rises on the right, and cutting across the valley behind it runs a pale, low line of arches. That is the railway viaduct, brand new in his day, striding across the Arc valley. So the picture holds two clocks at once, the mountain that has stood there since before memory and the fresh engineering of the trains that had just reached his corner of Provence. Cézanne lets the branch of the pine and the line of the viaduct meet near the middle, the old motif and the new one crossing on the same canvas.