O Monte Sainte-Victoire, arredores de Gardanne

Gardanne is a hill town about ten kilometres south of Aix-en-Provence. Cezanne settled there with Hortense Fiquet and their son in the summer of 1885 and stayed until the spring of 1886, painting the village itself several times, its houses stacked up the slope under a clock tower. This view turns away from the town and takes Sainte-Victoire from the south, an approach far less painted than the familiar one from the Aix side. The National Gallery of Art dates it to about 1887. It is worth looking at how much of it he never covered. The buildings and the brown hills are built up in short flat strokes, the mountain is indicated with a few violet shadows along its edge, and the rest of the mountain is bare primed canvas, left exactly where he stopped.