Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves

Cezanne had a studio built in 1902 on the Lauves hill just north of Aix-en-Provence, and in his last years he climbed past it to an open terrace where the plain and the mountain lay out in front of him. This is one of the views of Mont Sainte-Victoire he made from there between 1904 and 1906. The mountain is set down in separate patches of blue, green and ochre that never quite close into an outline, so the ridge and the sky end up built from the same weave of strokes.

It reached Moscow very fast. Sergei Shchukin, a textile merchant who was hanging new French painting in his house a short walk from the Kremlin, bought it less than two years after it was painted, while Cezanne was still barely known to the public at home.