El monte Sainte-Victoire

This mountain stood over Cezanne's whole life. Mont Sainte-Victoire rises east of Aix-en-Provence, where he was born, and he painted it more than 30 times, from many angles and distances. In this version from around 1890 he looks across the broad valley of the Arc river toward the pale limestone ridge. Down in the middle distance, easy to miss, runs the long arcade of a railway viaduct, built in his own lifetime to carry trains across the valley he had known since boyhood. He plays the modern stonework and the ancient mountain off each other quite calmly. The land is laid down in blocks of green, ochre and blue, each patch a considered decision rather than a copied fact.