La Montagne Sainte-Victoire et le Château noir

In his last years Cezanne painted the same mountain again and again, Mont Sainte-Victoire, the long limestone ridge east of his home town of Aix-en-Provence. By 1904 he was working from a studio he had built on a hill north of the town and walking out most days to face it. In this version the mountain floats pale at the back while a dark mass of trees in front half-hides the Chateau Noir, a house on the road there that he loved and had once tried to buy. The whole scene is built from patches of colour set side by side, sky and rock and leaves given almost the same weight. He died two years later, in 1906, having painted this one mountain more than 30 times.