Mount Sainte-Victoire

By 1900 Paul Cézanne had been painting this one mountain for the better part of 20 years. It is Mont Sainte-Victoire, the pale limestone ridge above Aix-en-Provence, his home town, and he came back to it again and again, in oil and watercolour, from the roads, the fields, his studio window, perhaps 80 times over his life. He was in his early 60s here, living quietly and painting almost every day, still barely known to the public even as younger painters in Paris were starting to seek him out. What they came to study is on this canvas. The mountain and the valley are built from small patches of colour, green and ochre and blue, set side by side like tiles. Hold your eye still and the ridge keeps its shape. Look longer and it loosens back into paint. That way of making solid form out of coloured planes is what Picasso and Braque would soon carry into Cubism. Cézanne himself rarely left Provence, and painted the mountain for the last time in the year he died, 1906.