Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1886-1887

1886 changed Cézanne's circumstances twice over. That year his boyhood friend Émile Zola published a novel about a painter who fails and takes his own life, and Cézanne, recognising himself in it, never wrote to Zola again. That same autumn his father died, leaving him a real fortune and, at last, the freedom to paint exactly as he wished. He spent much of that freedom back home in Provence, studying Mont Sainte-Victoire, the pale limestone mountain east of Aix he would return to dozens of times. In this version a tall pine leans in from the right and frames the peak across the valley, the view from his brother-in-law's estate at Bellevue. He builds the whole scene from small, patient patches of colour rather than drawn outlines.