Cézanne kept returning to Mont Sainte-Victoire because the mountain gave him one problem to solve again and again: how to build a picture out of color that is as solid as rock. He painted it from the 1880s until the year he died, from several places around Aix-en-Provence, and in the last canvases the mountain barely holds its shape.
Aix was his hometown, and the peak stood on its horizon his whole life. His stated aim was "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of museums."
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Durable is the right word for the mountain, but not for what lay at its feet. On 15 October 1877, a railway between Aix and Marseille opened, and it crossed the valley of the Arc River on a row of arches.
Six months later, on 14 April 1878, Cézanne wrote to his friend Émile Zola about the view from a train: a stunning motif on the east side, Sainte-Victoire and the rocks that tower over Beaurecueil. The scholar Tomoki Akimaru counts it as the first known time Cézanne called the mountain a motif.
In the canvas he painted between 1882 and 1885, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, those arches run through the middle distance. The museum's own text says the viaduct "is evocative of a Roman aqueduct, recalling paintings by Nicolas Poussin." I think that shows what he was after better than any talk of obsession: Cézanne took a machine five years old and made it as calm as a Roman ruin.
Where did Cézanne really stand?
Not in one place. Scholars usually count three main vantage points: the fields near Bellevue, where his brother-in-law owned a property, the Bibémus quarry, and Les Lauves, on the hill north of Aix.
The Arc valley came first. The Metropolitan Museum dates the first major campaign of paintings and drawings at that site between 1882 and 1890, and calls the 1882 to 1885 canvas the most completely worked of the group. It is neither signed nor dated, yet it appears complete.
Around 1887 he set up at Montbriand, on the edge of Aix, and painted the mountain under a large pine, with the same railway bridge standing on the right. That canvas hangs in the Courtauld Gallery in London. Around 1897 he worked at the Bibémus quarry, and the mountain rose above the rock from there.
In 1901 he bought a plot on the Lauves hill, and in 1902 he moved into the studio he had built on it. According to the Cézanne sites of Aix, the plot lay close to the viewpoint from which he could see his favorite subject. The studio's enormous north-facing window, five meters by three, was made for his Large Bathers. From each of these spots, he wanted the same thing from the mountain.
What You'll Discover
What he wanted from a mountain.
How the series ended.
Who bought the mountain itself.