A montanha Sainte-Victoire vista da pedreira de Bibémus

For the last decades of his life Cézanne painted one mountain near his home in Aix-en-Provence, Mont Sainte-Victoire, over and over, dozens of times, trying to get it right. Around 1897 he rented a cabin in the Bibémus quarry, an abandoned ochre pit whose stone had built much of old Aix. This is the view from there. The orange rocks in the foreground are the quarry walls, hot and angular, and beyond them the pale limestone peak rises across an empty gap of air. He builds the whole thing from patches of blue, green and orange set side by side, the darks made of colour instead of black. The quarry had been cut and then left, and the pines were beginning to take it back.